We're not in Kansas anymore

Hello all! Sorry it's been awhile, but it's been a busy week for VORTEX2. While we haven't seen anymore tornadoes, we have been on a lot of strong storms that have been tornado warned, and some that even produced some questionable (and not so questionable) tornadoes that we didn't actually see.

After getting our windshield replaced in Cheyenne, we headed East and met up with the rest of the armada in Kearney, Nebraska. On the way to Nebraska we saw some impressive storms but by the time we got on them they had significantly weakened.

On sunday, conditions were favorable for supercells along the Eastern Nebraska/Kansas border. We headed out from Kearny to Lincoln, then on to Auburn, NE. After some time sitting around Auburn a few of us noticed some storms developing a little farther south in Kansas. I assumed we would then head south to chase them, but we recieved some counterintuitve instructions to head into Missouri and wait for the new supercells to cross the Missouri River before intercepting them. The reasoning for this was that the field coordinator thought the storms were moving much faster than they actually were, so he thought we might have to get much further ahead of them than we actually did. In reality, we had over 2 hours to chase the storms in the flat country of Kansas, rather than the more difficult hilly and wooded terrain in Missouri. This was the first of a series of perplexing decisions from the higher-ups this week.

Anyway, we chased in Missouri and eventually let the storms come to us. The storm we chased was impressive and tornado warned for several hours. Though there were some tornado reports, most of the V2 crew are skeptical considering not one of us actually saw one form. That night we headed to Topeka. On the way, we discovered a tornado had touched down after dark right near the Wendy's we had eaten dinner at less than an hour before!

The next day was just a travel day as the weather didn't look all that great. The fleet moved to Salina, KS to position for what looked like a great day near Witchita on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning we headed south and hung out near Witchita to wait for storms to develop in our first Moderate Risk day for tornadoes. Unfortunately, as the day went on conditions looked less and less favorable for tornadoes so we kept heading west hoping for a storm to pop up. Our journey west took us through Greensburg, KS which many of you may remember took a direct hit from an EF5 that wiped out the entire town. It was sobering to realize the damage that a tornado can do to a town, even a year later the devastation was still evident. Eventually we ended up chasing a supercell that developed near Dodge City. At times it looked great. Kiel and I drove right under the rotating wall cloud at one point ( a stupid idea, but it worked out fine considering we're both still alive).

rotating wall cloud right before we drove under it.

After spending the night in Witchita, we again chased storms in southwestern Kansas on wednesday. The day was mainly cloudly and rainy, but eventually we hit a patch of sunny skies that we needed to heat up the ground and give us the explosive energy for thunderstorms. Some weak supercells developed in a line near Hugoton, KS that we chased on. Some of the features of note included a shelf cloud and some impressive mammatus clouds. Dark came, so we quit on those storms, but a brief tornado was reported and confirmed by photos after we ended on the storm. The 2 hour ride back to Dodge City was full of rain and wind, but eventually we made it back to our western themed hotel to have dinner around midnight in the hotel restaurant which they were nice enough to keep open for us.

shelf cloud

mammatus clouds

Today was a mess. All in all, it will probably go down as one of the most indecisive days of the experiment by the PI's which led to some low morale among everyone. This morning, things looked really great near Amarillo in the TX panhandle, so we all woke up early and headed south. After driving three hours, we got the message to hold up as new targets were being evaluated. We waited between two targets (both of which were about 3 more hours away) further south in TX or back north in Colorado for a valuable hour. Eventually it was decided among the PIs (reportedly by a coin flip) to back track and go back North to south eastern colorado. Although the decision was widely agreed to be a bad one at the time, we lucked out and got onto some very impressive storms near La Junta, CO. At times it looked like a pair of supercells right next to each other would both produce tornadoes simulataneously, all within our view. However, this dream scenario never really played out. The storms were very impressive to look at and had a lot of medium sized hail that piled up about an inch on most of the roads. One of the storms reportedly had a breif tornado, but we missed it again!

Today's storm as we approached. There's the barrel updraft, wall cloud, and rainshaft.

rain and hail pouring out of the storm as it became sort of a heavy-precip storm.

VORTEX2 only has 2 more days left, and it looks like we probably won't see another tornado. However, it's been an exciting ride and in the past 4 weeks I've seen more of the country than most people see in a lifetime. While the first year of this experiment will be considered by most to be a failure in that we only successfully deployed on one tornado, I think we collected some useful and valuable data on a wide range of storm types. We definitely will have a lot to work with on storms that DON'T produce tornadoes. This is important because it will help us understand why some storms produce them, and others that look like they might ultimately don't. In anycase, we've generally been on the most impressive storm in the plains each day, so it isn't like we've been missing tornadoes. The weather just didn't cooperate with us in one of the most quiet years anybody out here can remember.