vortex

n. eddy, whirlpool; engulfing situation

Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment or VORTEX, is a field project that seeks to understand how a tornado is produced by deploying around 18 vehicles that are equipped with customized instruments used to measure and analyze the weather around a tornado. The project has also stated that it is interested in why some supercells produce tornadoes while others do not. The original project took place in 1994 and 1995, and another project was run in 1999.
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A vortex (pl. vortices) is a spinning, often turbulent, flow (or any spiral motion) with closed streamlines. The shape of media or mass swirling rapidly around a center forms a vortex. It flows in a circular motion.
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Noun
1. the shape of something rotating rapidly
(synonym) whirl, swirl, convolution
(hypernym) round shape
2. a powerful circular current of water (usually the resulting of conflicting tides)
(synonym) whirlpool, maelstrom
(hypernym) current, stream
(hyponym) Charybdis

n. vortex

(n.)
Any one of numerous species of small Turbellaria belonging to Vortex and allied genera. See Illustration in Appendix.
  

(n.)
A supposed collection of particles of very subtile matter, endowed with a rapid rotary motion around an axis which was also the axis of a sun or a planet. Descartes attempted to account for the formation of the universe, and the movements of the bodies composing it, by a theory of vortices.
  

(n.)
A mass of fluid, especially of a liquid, having a whirling or circular motion tending to form a cavity or vacuum in the center of the circle, and to draw in towards the center bodies subject to its action; the form assumed by a fluid in such motion; a whirlpool; an eddy.