In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers looked at increasing trends in the severity of tornado outbreaks, measured by the number of tornadoes per outbreak. They found that these trends are increasing fastest for the most extreme outbreaks.

The sheer number of observations now streaming from land, sea, air and space has outpaced the ability of most computers to process it. The Data Science Institute’s newest working group —Frontiers in Computing Systems—will try to address some of the bottlenecks facing scientists working with these and other massive data sets.