The Ferocious Thunderstorms of Northern Argentina

Coming soon enough to a warming U.S.:

Nesbitt, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had dedicated much of the last 15 years to studying the freakish storms of this sleepy agricultural region. He first became fascinated by them in the early 2000s, when a NASA satellite tentatively identified them as the largest and most violent on Earth. “We knew about the Great Plains, the Sahel,” Nesbitt said. But this appeared to be another world. Radar images suggested cloud structures dwarfing those of Tornado Alley or Ganges Plain, many of them materializing in as little as 30 minutes. (Thunderstorms typically develop over the course of several hours.) And yet in the years since, little reliable data had emerged. Many in the meteorological community felt the storms were simply too remote and too dangerous for controlled study. “The only thing the science community knew for certain,” Nesbitt said, “was that these things were monsters.”