Welcome

Hello all!

I'll be spending 4 weeks of this summer out in the field chasing tornadoes in the Great Plains. I'm taking part in VORTEX2 (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2) --the largest tornado field experiment ever attempted. Due to popular demand, I've decided to fire up a blog to document my journeys and sights for friends and family. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for as many pictures and videos as I can take (hopefully a few close encounters with some tornadoes). I'll try to keep this updated as often as possible in between visits to gas stations and cheap motels across the plains.


A little background info:

VORTEX2 starts May 10th. I'll be hanging back with Kevin (one of my roommates and another senior in meteo) for graduation, but we'll be driving out to Oklahoma to meet up with the experiment the day after graduation (next saturday).

The project will have over 40 research vehicles with nearly 100 scientists participating from a bunch of different universities and government research agencies. The team from PSU will be driving around in Mobile Mesonets, which are minivans with a roof-rack weather station that can monitor windspeeds, temperature, and relative humidity. We'll be driving through some of the coolest (and most dangerous) parts of the storm in order to get up close measurements near tornadoes.

Other parts of the project include mobile weather balloon stations, 10 mobile radars on flatbed trucks, unmanned aircraft to fly into the storms, tornado "pods" to be dropped right in the path of tornadoes, fixed observing weather stations, and a few people taking pictures and video as well.

Since we're totally nomadic, we can operate anywhere from Texas to South Dakota between roughly the Rockies and the Mississippi River. This also means we'll be hopping from town to town, likely staying in a different motel every night.

For more info, check out the website at www.vortex2.org

We'll also be covered live on the weather channel live every night that we're chasing from 7-10pm. This should give everyone a good idea of what is going on, and you might even get a glimpse of me and the other Penn Staters.

That's all for now--time to enjoy the last week as an undergrad!