Big week for Vortex 2

Hello everyone! and sorry for the long delay, but I've been busy.

When I last posted, I had seen one tornado in my life. The count is up to 8 now.

To pick up where I left off, last wednesday we chased a storm south of Clinton, OK. I navigated again that day, and it was a somewhat stressful deployment. The storm was HP, which means it had heavy precipitation. As a result, it was very difficult to see anything going on within the storm. This caused some problems with navigation because we were in an area where we couldnt see very well on a storm that had reported tornadoes. However, as long as we were in the rain, there was no real threat of a tornado, but we had to be cautious that we didn't pop out of the rain/hail core to find a tornado bearing down on us! I didn't see the earlier tornadoes, but towards sunset we saw a funnel crossing over interstate 40 that was later confirmed to be a tornado (tornado 1).

After a long drive that night down to Wichita Falls, TX we spent the next day travelling down to Midland TX for deployments the next day. On Friday we headed out to west Texas. There was intense instability in the atmosphere that day which lead to very vigorous convection. While some teams ate a quick lunch the mobile mesonets deployed on a storm. It's a good thing we skipped lunch, because as the first team on the storm, we spotted two tornadoes, one of which was on the ground for over 10 minutes (tornadoes 2&3). Unfortunately, the radars were not deployed and many teams missed these tornadoes, but we stayed with the storm for the rest of the afternoon, even though they failed to produce any more tornadoes.

On Saturday, we drove up to New Mexico (the first time I had been there). It's a lot like west texas, but much more desolate. We spent some time in Carlsbad, NM waiting for convection to develop, and it seemed like it never would. However, storms fired up eventually, and we spent a few hours on a very high-based LP (low precip) storm that never really produced a tornado, but was very photogenic.

backside of the storm in Artesia, NM

Sunday we travelled north from Midland to Lubbock. Lubbock was a nice town, and is home to Texas Tech university. A few of the Tech students on the project showed us around town that night and we had a great time at the local bars. The next day, we returned to the same area of Eastern New Mexico and saw another storm that had much more precipitation and organization than the storm we saw there a few days before. Though it didn't produce a tornado, there was much more hail and precipitation with this storm. Later that night we travelled through Roswell, NM on the way home, where we were treated to an awesome display of mammatus clouds at sunset (not to be confused with UFOs!) sunset in Roswell, NM

After spending the night in Clovis, NM we drove into the texas panhandle on tuesday. After some typical afternoon waiting, a storm fired up near Channing, TX. We followed the storm for nearly 4 hours, over which time the storm produced numerous tornadoes. However, the storm was very atypical and each of the tornadoes was ragged and lasted under a few minutes. In this storm I manged to spot 3 tornadoes (tornadoes 4,5,6) For everyone involved, this was a great deployment. The mobile mesonets had the storm surrounded. The storm got angry and threw out baseballs at us. IN P3 we were in the worst parts of the storm, but some how managed to avoid losing a windshield. Two other probes werent so lucky. Probe 4 took some cracks to its windshield, while Probe 2 lost a side window in the sliding door of their minivan. On the way home, Kiel and I were delayed as we responded to one of the other team members who hit a deer with their minivan. After picking them up and bringing them back to the hotel, it was nearly midnight till we got back to the hotel in Amarillo.

the mesocyclone from inside the "bear's cage" --the area of the storm between the hail core and the mesocyclone. If a tornado forms, it's going to happen under this lowering. The flourescent green is from hail. It was even more vivid in person.

The first tornado in the texas panhandle, it may have lifted from the ground by now, but it was confirmed with a brief touchdown.

Another tornado in the same storm, it's pretty ragged and was short-lived.

HAIL! this is what the view from our probe often looks like.


sunset behind the anvil of a great storm!

Yesterday, we drove into western oklahoma for a High risk day. With conditions very favorable for tornadoes, we were all very hopeful for a long lived storm, with a long tornado that we could get a great deployment on. It wasn't long before explosive convection developed into a supercell. As we were driving towards the storm a tornado developed infront of our eyes (tornado 7), but soon dissipated. We spent the rest of the day in the hail core. Though there weren't any baseballs, there was ALOT of hail, covering the roads at times. (see the video!). The storm later produced a large tornado, but we didn't see it in P3 because we stayed a mile or two north of it in heavy rain and hail for much fo the deployme nt. In this storm, we didn't have as good of data collection due to poor road network and fairly fast moving storms.

In western, OK a tornado touched down as we approached the storm.

A view of the storm from very close.

Today we had a travel day, driving 8 hours north from oklahoma city to Colby, KS. It looks like the next few days will be fairly quiet, but we should have some chances for storm intercepts in the high plains of western kansas and eastern colorado.

Personally, It's been a thrilling week where I saw 7 tornadoes in 7 days. However, it's also been tiring. With long days of driving and chasing there's been little time for more than a few hours of sleep, and less time for relaxing and any sort of excersize. I think we're all in need of a down day or two to do some laundry and get some work done, but as long as there are storms we'll be out chasing them!