First Tornadoes of V2 2010

V2 intercepted multiple tornadic supercells today across central Oklahoma. I've had visions of creating a great blog post full of pretty tornado pictures when this day arrived, but alas, my team was far from the tornadic action. Based on the forecast storm motions of 40-50 mph, we decided to deploy our sounding teams in essentially a big box, with my truck being positioned at the northwest corner of the box. As it turns out, the tornadoes occurred at the southern end of our box (keeping our two NSSL trucks busy dodging storms and re-positioning), and aside from having to move at one point to avoid one intense cell, that may have been producing hail, my truck was pretty far removed from the action, and actually ended our day in sunshine!

So, no exciting pictures from our first tornado day, although we did launch a lot of balloons, and hopefully got some good data. It was a bit of a surreal experience though, as from where we sat the storm just looked like some dark clouds, and we were far enough away that it didn't appear all that menacing, yet all the while we were hearing increasingly dire reports on the radio and TV of major damage and loss of life in the greater OKC area. In particular there were some hard hit areas in Norman, very near where we had been prepping for ops last week. As in "the tornado missed the National Weather Center by 200 yards". We definitely had several "holy crap we were just there" moments seeing some of the pictures on the news as well while eating dinner at a local restaurant where some of the staff had to leave early because their homes had been destroyed by one of the tornadoes. As it is I'm sitting in a dark hotel because the power is still out from when the storms came through this area (this post is being brought to you by Verizon MiFi, by the way), but that's a far cry from some of the more serious damage. My heart goes out the people who lost loved ones (at least 5 fatalities reported so far), and those who lost their homes. I can't say I'm looking forward to the trip down I-40 in the morning which will likely take us past some of the damaged areas.

Looks like we may be operating again tomorrow....stay tuned.