Saturday, May 30, 2009

back to nebraska...

The past few days have been quiet weatherwise. Unfortunately I don't have any new pictures although the mesonet crew did get some press. After taking some time off Wednesday in Norman to do some laundry and get the oil changed in our probes, the V2 armada headed North to Topeka, KS.

In Topeka we got some great BBQ at a place called Boss Hawgs. Given the lack of weather and things to do in Topeka, we took two probes out to the local movie theater to see Angels and Demons. It was a good movie, but not nearly as good as the book. We later returned to the parking lot to discover our probes had been tagged by some locals with nothing better to do, then spent some time at the hotel bar.

The next day (yesterday) broke many records, but not good ones. Conditions were marginal (and i mean marginal) for supercells to develop over central Nebraska, so we hit the road fast from Topeka and chased after them. After a few hours of driving we finally caught up with a developing storm 30 miles south of the South Dakota border, but by the time we got there it was already weakening. When we completed a few transects of the storm with our probe, we decided to cut our losses and head home, possibly intercepting another storm on the way. However, local law enforcement had other plans. The probe i was driving, as well as probe 1 behind me were pulled over by the local sheriff for speeding. Though we got off with a warning, we soon learned that ben's probe (p5) and several other vehicles had also been pulled over by the same cop.

After the slight delay we drove south to Grand Island, where we had been earlier that day to spend the night in the local holiday inn. Overall, we were told the trip was over 600 miles- a V2 daily mileage record, with a record number of police encounters. All for a rainshower....

Today is a down day and tonight we will have a review of our missions and data collected so far as well as have a mid-experiment meeting to discuss how things have been going so far with each group. We'll stay here tonight, then either head towards minnesota and eastern South Dakota, or down to the Texas panhandle for operations tomorrow or monday. Overall , the weather pattern is looking a lot better for severe weather so we should see something good in the upcoming week.
In the meantime we've been having lots of fun visiting local restraunts and bars. Our trip coordinator has managed to get us into great hotels and usually lands us free drinks at the hotel bars we go to. We've also been getting to know our new mesonet navigators. Replacing harald in our probe is Kiel Ortega - an NSSL employee from OU.

We've also gotten some attention from the weather channel for our probe mascots ,that resulted in a piece aired last night featuring me, as well as all the other probe drivers which you can see at:

http://www.weather.com/multimedia/videoplayer.html?from=email&bcpid=823425597&bclid=877032950&bctid=24756145001

That's all for now, sorry for the lack of anything too excting, but things are like that lately.

1 comment:

  1. you always did like to speed! 84 mph on pa turnpike, black escort- truck was going too slow-sure chris. keep up a good atttitude nastier days on the way- dad

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