VORTEX2 Overview
Posted by Matthew on May 2nd, 2009 at 10:52am
Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 (VORTEX2) will be the largest field experiment to explore tornadoes. The project will take place from May 10th – June 13th 2009 and again during the spring of 2010. The project will cover a domain ranging from Southern Texas to North Dakota and from Colorado to Indiana. Because the domain is so large, the project will be nomadic with no home base. Therefore, over 50 hotel rooms will be needed each night, and the hotel can only be booked 8 hours in advance due to the ever changing weather forecast for the following day.
Despite technological advances, atmospheric scientists still do not know why, how, and when tornadoes will form. Currently, seven out of ten tornado warnings in the United States are false alarms; this is a dangerous situation because after a certain amount of false alarms people begin to ignore warnings. The long term goals of the project are to increase the average lead-time of tornado warnings from 13 minutes and to be able to predict how intense the tornado will become. The project will also aim to develop an understanding of the low level wind fields which are not resolvable on Doppler radars.
About 100 scientists and students will be participating in VORTEX2. These scientists come from sixteen different organizations that span four countries. The scientists will man approximately 40 vehicles that will surround a developing storm. The project will use 10 mobile Doppler radars, 12 tornado pods, 24 sticknets, 1 unmanned aerial vehicle, upper air soundings, 6 mobile mesonets, 4 particle probes, and Photogrammetry. For more information on these observing instruments please see this website: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/vortex2/instruments.php
I will be participating with Dr. Josh Wurman’s group from the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR). Some of you may recognize him from Strom Chasers on the Discovery Channel. I will be in what is a called a DOW-Follow vehicle assisting with radar deployment.
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