Vortex 2: May 21, 2010

Finally getting back around to toning images now that Vortex is over -- huzzah! Today's post is from the May 21 Vortex chase in Wyoming. The morning started with a daily briefing in (IIRC) North Platte, Nebraska.


"By Grabthars Hammer, I will strangle with these two hands the next person who passes uphill on a double yellow."

All kidding aside, this was shot as Josh explained (rather kindly, considering the circumstances) that everyone was expected to drive professionally. Because of recent media attention on Sean Casey (who was videotaped executing the aforementioned maneuver) and the Discovery Channel vehicles (who executed the aforementioned maneuver over and over, including after this speech), the last thing any of the PIs wanted to see was anyone else driving like a jackass.


Here, DOW 7 driver Herb Stein does a bit of radar dish maintenance. Most of the DOW drivers and scientists were also basically field-mechanics -- pretty much anything that broke could be fixed on the fly, even if it required welding.


The initial target was Kimball, Nebraska, a small town off of Interstate 80 deeply embedded in a field of Minuteman nuclear missile silos. We would return to Kimball quite a few times during V2 -- so many times that the suggestion of Kimball as a target led to many of the scientists chuckling and rolling their eyes.


Here, you see the disassembled UAVs -- remotely computer controlled aircraft designed to fly around a tornadic environment, sampling data. Unfortunately, the FAA is a PITA, requiring hundreds of pages of paperwork to be filed just to fly these babies -- and even then, they occasionally deny flights for no apparent reason. Such was the case on this day; they were ready to go, but the FAA said "we'll get back to you in a few days".

The irony is that there are a lot of other chasers flying RC planes around tornadoes -- they just don't file the paperwork. Because there are no real sanctions for violating the law, nothing happens to them. Those that try to obey the law get nothing but red tape. Gotta love bureaucracy!

Kimball was also the assembling point for the only tornado V2 caught in 2009 -- that tornado was near La Grange, Wyoming. And, wouldn't you know it...


Our destination was just a bit east of La Grange. After a long haul, which the scientists debated quite a bit (since the hotel that night was in North Platte, one heck of a drive from La Grange), the armada rolled up a bit late on a supercell chugging away in eastern Wyoming. Here, a wall cloud descends. Unfortunately, this is as good as it'd get, tornado-wise -- by the time the V2 scientists got there, the storm was ingesting tons of cold air, which usually kills any tornado potential. It didn't however, kill the "pretty storm" potential:


The structure was stunning at times. There's something magical about the upslope storms coming off of the Rockies frontrange -- the storms take on structures you just don't see very often in Nebraska or Kansas or Oklahoma.




The radar trucks stuck around and scanned the storm, despite it's lackluster potential -- the scientists actually need to collect "null sets" in addition to tornadoes. That is, they need to scan supercells that don't produce tornadoes in order to better understand why some do and some don't -- one of the current challenges in tornado forecasting.


Josh Wurman explains to the Discovery Channel camerawoman why this storm is hopeless.



My little sister tagged along for this trip -- I like this shot since it looks like her hair is standing on end (it's just wind).


A ginormous panorama of the Wyoming storm -- click the photo to go to a much larger (but still dramatically scaled down) version of this shot.

Eventually, the scientists bailed on this storm and headed back to North Platte, rolling into the hotel past midnight. The Field Command truck broke down in the Middle of Nowhere I-80; the field commanders didn't get to the hotel until 3AM (and another truck needed to be driven up from Norman, Oklahoma). This late arrival (and hotel placement) is one of the main factors in why Vortex 2 missed the epic supercell and tornado in South Dakota on May 22.