Long time, no post!

Since VORTEX 2 round 2 starts up two weeks from today, I figured it was time to dust off the ol' blog again. I figure I should have at least 1 post between last year's VORTEX operations and this year's! I thought about doing a laundry list of all the exciting that happened in the interceding months, but I figured most people who read this already know about the big ones (namely a certain wedding) so instead I figured I'd go back to basics and post some visual jet-noise.


Since the one air show we were planning on going to prior to my departure for V2 this spring was canceled on account of the base being busy keeping the supply lines open to the front lines in Afghanistan, Miranda and I took a trip down the road to Goldsboro to get our jet noise fix courtesy of the Strike Eagles at Seymour Johnson AFB. In doing so we found what has become my new favorite BBQ place in NC, Wilbur's n highway 70 in Goldboro. The pork was good, but the ambiance makes it. We hadn't been there 10 minutes when our lunchtime conversation was interrupted as the building began to shake and the air filled with a deafening roar, the unmistakable sound of two F-15Es taking off with their Pratt and Whitneys at full power. Gotta love it! We followed up lunch with an afternoon sitting just outside the fence along the runway, watching jets come and go...some people spend their spring break at the beach, I prefer a cornfield next to a fighter base : ).

Stay tuned for updates from the road starting in about two weeks. I'll be out for the whole month of May, and hopefully we'll see more action than we did last year!

Helping out SPC

As some of you may, or may not know, the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, OK is responsible for issuing all of the Tornado and Severe thunderstorm watches across the country. Anytime you find yourself under one of these watches, its because one of the guys or gals out at SPC felt the conditions were favorable for severe weather, and that the watch was warranted. These people are the real deal severe weather experts, I don't care what the Weather Channel commercials say.

So imagine my surprise, and I'll admit, excitement, to hear as we were getting ready to launch a pre-storm sounding earlier this afternoon that the good folks at SPC were very interested in what our sounding might show, as they were considering issuing a Tornado watch for our area. Sure enough, shortly after our sounding was finished and we uploaded it to the VORTEX2 field catalog, which SPC has access to, a Tornado Watch was issued for our area, including parts of NE, IA, MO, and KS. The text for the watch is included below (emphasis added by me):

"DISCUSSION...APPARENTLY SURFACE-BASED CONVECTION IS BEGINNING TO
DEVELOP ALONG THE SE NEB/NE KS BORDER IMMEDIATELY IN ADVANCE OF A
SURFACE WAVE ON THE FRONT...AND IN AN AREA OF STRONG INSTABILITY.
DESPITE THE WARMING NOTED IN THE 850-700 MB LAYER IN THE 19Z TOP AND
20Z VORTEX2 SPECIAL SOUNDING IN SE NEB...COOLING IS LIKELY OCCURRING
FROM THE W WITH THE CLOUD BAND AND AN ASSOCIATED SHORTWAVE TROUGH
EJECTING NEWD OVER CENTRAL KS. GIVEN THIS EARLY
DEVELOPMENT...THUNDERSTORM COVERAGE WILL LIKELY INCREASE THROUGH THE
AFTERNOON/EVENING. THE STORM ENVIRONMENT IS FAVORABLE FOR
SUPERCELLS WITH VERY LARGE HAIL GIVEN STEEP MID LEVEL LAPSE
RATES...MLCAPE OF 2500-3500 J/KG...AND STRONG DEEP LAYER VERTICAL
SHEAR. ADDITIONALLY...BOUNDARY LAYER DEWPOINTS IN THE UPPER 60S AND
BACKING/STRENGTHENING LOW-LEVEL FLOW WILL CONTRIBUTE TO AN
INCREASINGLY FAVORABLE ENVIRONMENT FOR A FEW TORNADOES THROUGH LATE
EVENING."

I don't know how big of a role our sounding ultimately played in the decision process, but it still feels pretty good to have been able to help out with some extra data in their region of interest. Ultimately the V2 armada intercepted a supercell in western MO today and while it did not produce any significant tornadoes, we still managed to get some good data. This was the fourth day in a row we've intercepted a supercell, a definite improvement over how the project had been going for the first few weeks!

Tornado!

So it is currently 3am, and I just got to the hotel a half hour ago, in part because we ended our day 200 miles from our hotel, and in part because a rouge supercell decided to merrily cruise along I-80 right along our return path, with radar indications suggesting "vehicle damaging hail" as the field commander put it. It wasn't all bad though, waiting for the storm to pass gave us an excuse to stop for steak in Ogallala, NE.

The steak of course is to celebrate finally seeing a tornado during VORTEX2! We intercepted a supercell near LaGrange, WY today that produced a rather impressive, long lived torando. Unfortunately, while Heather and I could see the tornado, it was while we were largely driving away from it to position for a balloon launch, so my pictures were taken leaning out the window looking behind us. In the interest of full disclosure, there was a period where we were driving towards the tornado, but we'll save that story for another time. All told we had a solid deployment for a few hours on this supercell, and then once operations ended were able to chase a second supercell (which Heather and I were in great position on from the get go from our last balloon launch) until dark. It didn't produce a tornado, but had a great wall cloud and some fantastic rotation.

Took plenty of pictures, as you may imagine, but can only muster editing one to post tonight because as I said it's 3am, and morning briefing time will be here before I know it! There will be more pictures to come soon, once I actually get a chance to sit down and go through them. Anyway, here's a shot of our tornado, enjoy!

Supercells!!!

Today the V2 armada finally caught not just one, but two supercells in southeast WY/northeast CO. Still no tornadoes, but at least we finally had some good rotation in the storms we were chasing (hey, it only took 4 of the 5 weeks of the project!). It was a long, tiring day (lots of driving!) so I'm not up for a full recap right now, but just wanted to share the happy news. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures that look particularly supercell-ish. We were either driving our busy with balloon preparation whenever something interesting was going on. But we did see a nice rainbow, which always makes for a pretty picture:





Now it's time for sleep in the Travel Lodge next to the Corrections Facility in Sterling, CO.....if nothing else our accomadations have been memorable this trip ; ).

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!