Tornado!

It took several weeks of traveling the plains, but I finally saw a tornado last week, 2 in fact! They were short-lived (the first had dissipated by the time I got my camera out!), and far away, but they were real-deal tornadoes.



This was especially exciting since we've often been pretty far from the "business end" of the storm for our balloon operations this year. We've been going at a pretty torrid pace for the last few weeks, intercepting storms in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado since my last post.

This included a long-lived supercell in TX that we were able to collect a lot of good data on:



We also saw some great mamatus clouds outside of Roswell, NM, along with some dust being kicked up by strong surface winds.



In fact, the whole ride to the hotel from Roswell was quite picturesque:



We've also had some down time, including a visit to the Badlands National park last Friday while we were traveling from South Dakota down to Nebraska, where we operated yesterday. The whole sounding team was there, along with the Field Coordinators (their truck is the ambulance-looking thing in the back)



And the obligatory truck shot, this time of 2/3 of the "NCAR Family", NCAR1 and NCAR2 (NCAR3 was behind me while I was taking the picture).



Tomorrow is my last day with V2 before heading home, hopefully we'll get one last good operations day before I leave. Even if we don't, though, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing Miranda and Dixie, and to sleeping in my own bed again!