Where the wind comes sweeping down the plains

Hi Folks,

Not a terrible amount of information to report on today but if I can't motivate myself to blog on day one of deployment then what hope do I have for future motivation? Myself and two other members of the NCSU team arrived in Oklahoma City around noon today after an uneventful connection through Atlanta. We went on a mini adventure with a couple of folks from EOL (Earth Observing Lab, associated with NCAR) looking for helium tanks in OKC. Apparently their normal source for helium (for the balloons we'll be launching) told them there was a 4 week backlog due to Mother's Day coming up. Seriously? That many mothers are getting balloons for Mother's Day that they've depleted all of the helium in the greater metropolitan OKC area? (Only myyyyy mother deserves that many balloons, wink wink wink) Anyways, long story short the EOL folks managed to convince them that our mission was of *slightly* greater importance and they sold us 12 150 lb tanks.

From there we took the short drive south down to Norman to the University of Oklahoma's campus, home of the National Weather Center. Housed in the same building is the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the Storm Prediction Center, the OKC NWS WFO, and the OU School of Meteorology. It's quite an impressive building to be in. I'm now the proud owner of an ID badge that gives me building wide access. We spent most of the day down in the vehicle bay loading the trucks, counting the sondes, installing some software on the laptops and just generally making sure everything was in working order.

On tap for tomorrow is more prep work, a practice balloon launch in the afternoon, and a "safety third, data first" team meeting late in the afternoon. Our destination for Saturday is still undetermined. Models have been showing slightly less than optimal conditions for svr-wx (severe weather forecasts) but there's hope that it will come around. One possibility is a long drive down to east Texas which may backfire and put us out of play on Sunday/Monday. As always I won't be disclosing our exact locations or destinations to avoid giving the amateur chaser community information that may be harmful to our mission (with the exception of today, it's no secret the armada is in Norman).

That's all for now. I'll leave you with a picture I snapped with my phone of the Texas A&M/Texas Tech and Oklahoma University's Doppler On Wheels (DOW) trucks from the NSSL vehicle bay. Cool huh?