VORTEX 2 - Who, What, When, Where and Why

This summer I've been invited to participate in the second field phase of the VORTEX 2 field experiment. VORTEX 2 (it involves the government so of course there's an acronym - Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment) is a follow up to the initial VORTEX field campaign which took place in 1994-1995 and was the basis for a large portion of our understanding of tornadoes. The essence of the campaign is an attempt to build a highly resolved data set that measures the atmosphere in and around storms that form tornadoes. Scientists from 16 different organizations (including NCSU) will use a variety of instruments (mobile radar, lidar, mesonets, upper air soundings) to observe storms in the central US from May 1st through June 15th. I will be deployed with the NCSU team from April 29th through May 24th. Our task is to launch balloons (with attached sensors to measure temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) in the vicinity of tornadoes to measure how the atmosphere and the tornado interact. V2 is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA - the people who run the National Weather Service) to the tune of 10+ million dollars. Since you the readers (aka the taxpayers) are funding my summer experience, I thought I would blog my way through the campaign to let you know how it's going.

Since our mission is to directly observe tornado producing storms it is of course necessary to go where the storms form. Our fleet of vehicles and scientists (hereafter the "armada") will travel from state to state on a daily basis, trying to forecast the location where storms are most likely to form. Some of the places we will most likely be visiting include Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see some new places and experience weather that's hard to find on the east coast. It's also a great opportunity for me to observe some of the best minds in my field as they puzzle through coordinating such a massive campaign. I'm not looking forward to experiencing some of the hotels we're likely to find along the way (there's rarely a Hilton in backwater Oklahoma).

I will try to use this blog to give you all a sense of what we're doing on a daily basis, what life is like on the road, and to capture the feeling of the storms we're sent to chase. Since most of my audience will be non-scientists I'll try to avoid jargon - but it's going to be impossible for me to resist explaining some of the science we're discovering. If you have questions along the way you should be able to post comments or shoot me an email and I'll try to reason out an answer. If you're really interested in what we're doing you can try to catch daily updates on our whereabouts on The Weather Channel (sometime in the AM) or you can follow the NCSU team on our group blog posted to the NCSU main site (http://wolfpackvortex.blogspot.com/) or our Twitter account (http://twitter.com/VORTEX2NCSU).

The initial model runs for the weekend look favorable and it looks like we could definitely hit the ground running on Saturday. Stay tuned!

-Casey