V2 Operations Day 4.... back to OK

After chasing in TX yesterday, today we returned to OK, initially targeting Clinton, where we had spent the night on Monday. Today, though was more fruitful as we actually ended up with a target supercell and were able to deploy accordingly.

Today I was joined by Bill, one of the NCAR scientists, as he and Tim had swapped places with Bill in my truck and Tim driving the support truck. We got into position and launched a sounding from Canton, OK, just after 5 pm as storms were beginning to develop to our north along a cold front. We were then sent east to Okeene, OK to begin sampling the target storm using our "slow moving storm" strategy, which places us near the forward flank of the storm. Making this deployment extra interesting, our mobile internet was not working, meaning that we didn't have radar data or the positions of the other V2 vehicles, to give us situational awareness. Thus we had to make our initial intercept visually, which was a bit daunting since it's been a good 5 years since my last real storm chase.

We reached Okeene as the storm was beginning to organize to the north. As we closed on the storm, I could see the updraft region and knew that we needed to move east to get into position. We then passed several of the deployed doppler radars further suggesting that we needed to move east as our position is supposed to be east of them. As the storm began dropping forward flank precipitation, we decided to move slightly south so that we'd be able to launch our balloon without getting overtaken by it. By 6:20 we were in position to launch, and got our balloon off by 6:30, just as some light precipitation was beginning to fall and lightning was increasing. We continued to reposition to the south, eventually launching another sounding near Union City, OK just as the sun was setting at about 830 pm. We probably could have gotten off another sounding or two over the course of the day had we stayed closer to the storm instead of heading east before we moved south, but for our first real deployment I think it went pretty well. And when we stopped to launch at sunset we deployed our orange hazard flasher on the roof of the truck....which looked pretty sweet:


Tomorrow looks to be a relocation day, as no storms are expected. This will actually be nice as it will give us a chance to debrief the last two days and figure out what if anything we can/should change. Friday will hopefully find us out chasing again though, so be sure to check back for more reports.