June 10, 2009
Mike Bettes
Vortex 2: Double Layer Cake Anyone?
V2 has a hot hand right now! Three of the last 5 storms they've chased have produced a long-lived tornado, a supercell with grapefruit sized hail, and another supercell with a brief tornado touchdown. Tuesday was a chase in west-central Kansas that produced just one storm. V2 did one heck of the job nowcasting it and being right where they needed to be. Our crew was set up well, but ended up being in position in the early stage of the storm. We saw good inflow and golfball sized hail, but 20 minutes after it passed over us, it formed what some of the mets were calling the greatest supercell structure they'd ever seen. Impressive! I was the navigator for my crew and ened up putting us on the wrong side of river with no option to go east to get ahead of the storm. My bad. Luckily, while we were stuck in Ford County, Katy Tur and crew were waiting for it in neighboring Kiowa County. They saw the incredible supercell that looked like a double layer cake. Awesome! I truly think they thought this was going to produce a massive tornado. It only produced a weak brief touchdown. Baffling, but that's why they're conducting this research, to figure out why some thunderstorms produce tornadoes and other don't, and why some produce weak ones, while others produce destructive EF-5s. Anyway, terrific day once again for Vortex 2. It's funny what you can see when the weather cooperates.
June 5, 2009
Mike Bettes
Vortex 2: It Is On!
It's 7:00am Mountain Time as I write this in the parking lot of yet another pristine motel with a terrific view of a state correction facility. You just can't make this stuff up folks. Tornado chasing is very glamorous! I won't bore you with the details of yesterday's chase. Let's just say, it wasn't ideal, although we did finally make it to Wyoming for a bit. Today is the day Vortex 2 has been waiting for. Everything is coming together in one spot to make this the best opportunity so far. I would like to see higher CAPE and dewpoints, but I'll take it. Supercells should fire this afternoon and could produce tornadoes in the corner of WY, CO, NE, and KS. It's a fairly unpopulated area with a decent road network and flat terrain. Nice! Anyway, my camcorder will be rolling. The wait may finally be over. Stay tuned. I took this picture in Limon yesterday. I thought it was funny. When you roll into a smaller town with an army of vehicles, sometimes it's tough to find a place to park.
June 2, 2009
Mike Bettes
Vortex 2: Say Cheese!
That last couple of chase days have been frantic but still no tornado. The storm we were on Sunday in Iowa just didn't want to spin even though everything was in place(good CAPE, dewpoints, and helicity). The storm we drove into Monday was a strong line on the Nebraska/Kansas border. It had bits and pieces of rotation in it but ultimately didn't produce a tornado either. What we did finally see was some pea sized hail. It was deafening as it pounded our car. No dents thank goodness. The next few days, and I don't want to say this, look calmer. You have to think at some point a tornado is going to happen. As I write this, there have been only 3 tornado reports in the last 10 days in the Vortex 2 domain. That's ridiculous! In fact, since the project began, the number of tornadoes in the domain is down 76%. That's like a basketball team that averages 100 points a game, scoring just 24. Unheard of!
Journal Highlights
May 27, 2009
Mike Bettes
Vortex 2: Chase into the Metroplex
Day 17 provided us with some action in Dallas/Fort Worth. Cities are not ideal for V2 because of the traffic congestion, trees, and buildings. The radars have to be very selective in where they set up and mesonets, probes, sticknets, etc have to do the same because you can get a lot of obscurities in the data with surface obstructions. We ended up on the north side of town at the tail-end of rush hour. Traffic wasn't too bad but finding a place to set up was a bit challenging. We followed one of the DOWs as is tracked a storm west of Fort Worth that split into two. The northern storm came right over us. We saw a variety of features with it, heavy rain, lightning, hail shafts, inflow bands, and mammatus clouds. We didn't personally witness and hail or funnels, but 2" diameter hail was reported with it. It is relatively rare to get data samples on a left-turner. They can produce clockwise spinning tornadoes. DOW has only sampled left-turners a handful of times over the years. They are usually looking for right-turners.
