17 Facts About Joshua Wurman

Joshua Wurman moved to Boulder, Colorado to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and later to Norman, Oklahoma where he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Oklahoma.

Joshua Wurman's father is noted architect and founder of the TED conferences, Richard Saul Wurman.

Joshua Wurman is the discoverer of sub-kilometer hurricane boundary layer rolls, and hurricane tornado-scale vortices, and wrote the pioneering papers on mapping tornado winds, multiple vortices, and other tornado-related phenomena.

Joshua Wurman has led DOW observational studies of wildfires and eclipses.

Joshua Wurman's team observed the top two fastest wind events and two contenders for the largest tornado circulations.

Joshua Wurman leads the ROTATE tornado observational project every spring and hurricane intercepts in the fall.

Joshua Wurman has authored and co-authored many scientific publications relating to hurricane and tornado dynamics and weather radar technology including two articles in Science, articles in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Monthly Weather Review, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Weather and Forecasting, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and others.

Joshua Wurman authored an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society analyzing the potential impacts of a major tornado passing through urban areas.

Joshua Wurman authored in PNAS the first comprehensive observation-based climatology of tornadoes, revealing that they are much stronger than damage surveys suggest.

Joshua Wurman authored an article linking DOW-mapped Hurricane Tornado-Scale Vortices to extreme wind gusts and damage.

Joshua Wurman built the first DOW in 1995 from spare parts from NCAR and other facilities and as of March 2014 has built eight DOW units.

Joshua Wurman invented the first quickly-deployable narrow beam C-band radar, the C-band On Wheels and has proposed a network of S-band On Wheels to be incorporated into the Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets.

Joshua Wurman directs the DOW radar network which is a National Science Foundation Community Instrumentation Facility, a core part of the Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets, which is based in Boulder and affiliated with the University of Illinois.

Joshua Wurman is in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists and engineers in the United States that are dedicated to reinvigorating the interest of young people in science and engineering.

Joshua Wurman has appeared in many television shows and his work, particularly with the DOWs, and is cited in numerous popular and technical books about weather.

Joshua Wurman is best known to the general public as the "scientist" in The Discovery Channel's reality series Storm Chasers, where he led a group of storm chasers conducting research during tornado season.

Joshua Wurman was featured on National Geographic Channel's Tornado Intercept and The True Face of Hurricanes, as well as in the IMAX film Forces of Nature.