The TIVs

If you're ever looking for a good way to get everyone from a local town to come out to your hotel parking lot, park one of these out front.

TIV1:

TIV2:

These are the Tornado Intercept Vehicles, TIV1 and TIV2, made famous on the Discovery Channel show "Stormchasers" and yes, they're part of our VORTEX armada. The guy that drives them is pretty cool, he let Kate drive TIV1 around the parking lot the morning we were in Wichita a few weeks back.

Sights from the road

As you may have gleaned from my posts, we've been doing a LOT of driving across the plains the last couple weeks. And while in many cases there isn't a whole lot to see out here, we've managed to find a couple local gems and stop to take a picture:

Carhenge in Alliance, NE.
Alliance has the dubious honor of being remembered as the place that we got to stay at the 1st Inn. If you've ever wondered what it's like to sleep in an ashtray, you should stop by the 1st Inn in Alliance, NE. However, Alliance is also home to a little place called Carhenge. As the name suggests, Carhenge is an homage to Stonehenge, only constructed entirely of old cars. A must see for any storm chase passing through town.



There are other pieces of "art" scattered around the site as well, the common theme being that everything is made out of car parts. Two of my favorites were this dinosaur:



And the "wagon" (get it?).



And for a guy who walks around with the "Wizard of Oz" theme as his cell phone ringer, we just had to stop by Dorothy's house. I'd make a "we're not in Kansas anymore" joke, but we actually were still in Kansas...Liberal to be exact.



Other sites that we heard about, but didn't bother to visit included the World's Largest Prairie Dog (this would have earned a stop, had we not learned it was made out of concrete!) and the Barbed Wire museum near Hays, KS....maybe next time.

Nebraska to Texas and Back again

When I wrote my last post we were in Nebraska, as I write this post, we're in Nebraska again (albeit a different city). However, in the interceding days, we've been to Texas and back. I think the most apt description of this project that I've heard yet came from one of our balloon compatriots from NCAR, who described it as "the magical mystery tour of the Great Plains". Our operations domain extends from South Dakota to Texas, and I figured we'd traverse the whole thing over the course of the 5 weeks that we're out here....I just didn't plan to do it twice in a matter of days : p.

On the brighter side, all of the miles we've been traveling rewarded us with a supercell back on Tuesday (FYI I had to go back to my notebook and first look up which date we intercepted the storm, and then confirm the day of the week....the spiral into temporal confusion continues!). While it didn't produce a tornado it was actually an interesting storm. It was intially a severe multicell storm west of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, and there was some heated debate as to whether we should attempt an intercept, as our operations generally call for avoidance of large urban areas at all costs for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that we would have been trying to intercept during the evening rush hour. As this debate raged on, the storm began to show signs of becoming "outflow dominant" meaning the cold air that results from the precipitation falling and evaporating was rushing out ahead of the storm, which is generally bad news for supercell organization and tornadogenesis. Things were looking bleak when the storm began to split in two, with one of the cells taking a hard turn to the left and beginning to head north (referred to as a "left-mover"). This storm developed a region of anti-cyclonic (clockwise) rotation, indicative of a left-moving supercell and appeared to be getting more organized on radar.

While all of this happening, the 4 sounding teams were stretched out in roughly a north-south line to facilitate faster reaction to just this kind of change in storm evolution (the coordinators had yet to pick a clear target, so the sounding leaders had decided to space us out some so we could hopefully respond effectively when they did pick a target storm). As a result, my truck and one of the NSSL trucks were in decent position to move west and deploy on this new left-moving storm. We did so, with my truck getting in position just ahead of the storm to take near-storm soundings on the forward flank (we ended up making 2 soundings) while the NSSL truck moved further north to sample the inflow environment. Eventually the other NCAR truck was able to get in position as well and get an additional sounding off. Making matters even more interesting, between the two soundings that my truck launched the storm transitioned from appearing to be more of a left-mover with anti-cyclonic rotation, to taking a turn to the right and developing a region of cyclonic circulation more like a traditional supercell. This could prove to be a very interesting case to study once we get back. Unfortunately, given our position we couldn't get any cool "supercell-esque" pictures, but I did mange to grab a shot of a rainbow before we redeployed from our first sounding location.



After this, we spent the rest of the week either down (Wednesday, in Norman, OK) or traveling (Thursday, to Topeka, KS). We chased some rather weak storms yesterday, here in Nebraska. While they still weren't really the kind of storms we wanted we did manage to do a good job of getting all of the sounding units into position and launching in near-storm mode within 15 minutes of each other, which bodes well for once we actually get a tornadic supercell (note the optimism...it's still "when", never "if" we see a tornadic supercell). We're down again today, enjoying a day in Grand Island, NE and we have several possible plays over the next few days, however they're somewhat far apart so it sounds like there's going to be some discussion this evening over what we're actually going to try for. When you have possibilities ranging from MN to TX over the course of 2 days, you can't really do them all!

The conditions still aren't great for supercells/tornadoes, but at least we've been chasing in areas where conditions warrant a "slight risk" of severe weather from the Storm Prediction Center, which is a vast improvement over what we'd been chasing over the last couple weeks. This past Wednesday there wasn't even a chance of thunder within the entire VORTEX2 domain, let alone anything severe!

Quick update

Just wanted to give a quick update before I crash tonight. Yesterday we operated in western South Dakota/eastern Wyoming (well, my team was in eastern Wyoming, pretty much everyone else was in SD). It was a frustrating day, as the convection never really moved off of the Black Hills so we weren't really able to deploy and do much more than launch environmental soundings all day. I think it was extra frustrating as I had been secretly hoping for a down day to go see Mount Rushmore, or do some hiking in the Black Hills. This may give you an idea of how the project has been going the last week or so...my first thought as we rolled into Hot Springs, SD two days ago was "Ooo mountains, lets go hiking!" rather than anything related to storm intercepts : p. This is the kind of thing a persistent ridge over the central US will do to a person.

Today though, we actually got a decent storm intercept and I was quite happy with it. Still wasn't a supercell and still no tornadoes, but at least there was marginally enough shear present to organize the storm into something we could actually run operations on. My compatriot in NCAR1 today was Matt, one of the other NCSUers, as Lou and Chris, my NCAR buddies, had to run to Scottsbluff, NE to get us some more helium. We managed to get ourselves into position on the storm quite readily and then maintained our position without getting overrun by the precipitation. Not only that, but we were averaging about 10 mins from stopping the truck to getting a balloon in the air, which is pretty good seeing as we were told to expect 15-20 mins. prep time coming into the project.

So all told I'm feeling better after our operations today. Things still look pretty marginal for the coming days, but I've heard a rumor that it looks a little better by early/mid week (I haven't been looking at the medium-range models forecasts myself lately as I've been finding it too depressing : p). I'm trying to keep up a Great Pumpkin-esque philosophy with regards to our storms, it's not if we will get a tornadic supercell, but rather when we will get it ; )
That's all for now, we did stop at Carhenge the other day on our way north from Nebraska....I have pictures that I plan to post at some point, but not right now cuz I'm just too darn tired!

Operations on Tuesday and Wednesday

In spite of a pattern that is the antithesis of what you want for severe weather (someone didn't get the memo and gave us a wicked ridge over the central US instead of a nice trough!) V2 has been running operations the past two days. Storms have been weak and poorly organized at best, leading to challenges in terms of targeting a given storm and some definite frustration among the teams. We've been launching balloons, both in the pre-storm environment, as well as near some of the storms, so if nothing else we're getting some practice launching in a variety of conditions.

Yesterday we ran sounding ops from the parking lot of a Cabela's outdoor store in Sydney, NE (I'm still kicking myself for not volunteering to be the early deployment team for that one!). Which lead to some nice photo-ops with the statue of battling Caribou out front.
Today, we were further north in the Nebraska sand hills operating between Alliance and Hyannis NE. For those of you New Englanders reading this, Hyannis, NE is nothing like Hyannis, MA, and we'll leave it at that. The storms weren't all that exciting and we ended up switching targets a few times trying to find something decent to go after. We're still waiting to get a good supercell deployment....any day now, I'm sure : p.

On a brighter note, though, I had two VUSIT sightings today while on the road (that's the Valparaiso University Storm Intercept Team for those not in the know). Hopefully our path's will cross at some point over the next few weeks when one of us isn't traveling at 70 mph so we can say hi!

My truck is like a my computer.....

Had a new and exciting experience Monday morning. Chris and piled into NCAR1, the Chevy Silverado 2500 that I've been working out of during V2 to start our trek north to Nebraska on what was supposed to be a simple travel day. I turned the key, and after some hesitation the engine turned over, at which point the truck started idling in a manner than can best be described by violet shaking. We coaxed it around the hotel parking lot to the other sounding trucks and determined we better get it to a Chevy dealer ASAP. Our concern deepened as we got on the road and determined our max speed was 20 mph. Luckily the Hays Chevy dealer was only about 2 blocks away, and the guys there managed to get it in and start looking at it pretty quickly.
After running some tests and checking a few things the mechanic did something that I and probably every other PC user out there does quite frequently. He reset the truck's computer (I still have visions of some secret ctl-alt-delete keys somewhere under the hood), and poof problem fixed! So we still don't know what was wrong, just that it was apparently a computer issue. Yay for technology! Anyway, truck is still going strong several hundred miles later, and hopefully it will stay that way!

Greensburg, KS....why we're out here

On the way up to Hays, KS last Saturday our team took a slight detour off of the route north to swing through Greensburg, KS. For those of you that don't know Greensburg was witness to a devastating tornado just over two years ago, on 4 May 2007. It was the first tornado to be rated an EF-5 on the new Enhanced Fujita scale for tornado intensity. By many accounts the small town was "wiped off the map" by the event.

It was both sobering and heartening to see the town 2 years after the tornado. Sobering in that many of the scars were still there. Vacant slabs where homes once stood, trees still standing yet stripped of their bark and no longer bearing leaves. Yet it was also heartening to see the reconstruction underway, new homes going up, a new school, and the sign welcoming you to town that read "Greensburg, KS Rebuilding... Stonger, Better, Greener".

I snapped a few pictures as we came into town on the main road, however quickly stowed the camera as we turned off of onto one of the side streets. It just didn't feel right and I knew if I was living in a place that had been ravaged by a tornado I probably wouldn't particularly care for people driving by snapping pictures as though it was some kind of attraction. And honestly the few pictures I did take don't come close to doing justice to the scene.

It may sound trite, but to me this is why we're out here doing this project. It's not about the thrills or getting cool video, or even necessarily about the scientific curiosity of understanding how these storms work. Rather, its to keep events like Greensburg from being so tragic. While we're not going to be stopping tornadoes from tearing through towns like Greensburg anytime soon, if our research can help better warn or prepare people for their impact then I see it being worth the money and time being spent out here. Eleven people died on that May evening two years ago, and one of the best ways to keep that from happening is to continue to advance our understanding of these storms and use that knowledge for better warnings and longer lead times so people can get to safety.

Anyway, sorry for the downer of a post here....I promise future posts will return to pretty pictures and stories of my adventures with weather balloon launching ; ).