Sunday, May 9, 2010

Travel Days: Perry, OK


Day….lost track of time. May 9, 2010

Most importantly, let’s start out with a big Happy Mothers Day to my wonderful majah and my newest mom Shirley!  Thanks for putting up with your crazy jet setting, tornado chasing daughter!   I love and miss you both!

Since the last blog, we have had a little bit of excitement with a lot of travel days in between.  We spent two nights in Hays, KS, the first night recovering from the drive and preparing the instruments (and ourselves) for a small chase day.  Our first official chase (mostly practice though) was on Thursday.   We spent most of the day waiting at the America’s Best Inn in Hays.  The famous saying with all of us is wake up and get the instruments ready so we can “hurry up and wait.”   It was great to get a chance to walk around and see everyone prepare their instruments for the chase.  This was also the first day that I got to see the TIV in person!  I hope they are able to get what they are looking for this year…I can’t wait for the IMAX movie to come out!   

Several locals stopped by and asked if “the big one” was headed their way….everyone gets pretty worked up when we roll into town.  I find it humorous when people run up to us on their cell phone asking if they should take cover when there isn’t a cloud in the sky….but our group is pretty intimidating!  After hanging around is Hays for several hours we drove about 20 miles west, only to hurry up and wait again!  We started chasing around 6pm local time and intercepted a small supercell north of Oberlin, KS. 
 
Our first deployment was an adventure!  Our method wasn’t quite as organized as we had hoped, but we were able to successfully deploy one out of the two probes.  The first stop we all jump out of the pickup while Cameron took his time finding his rain jacket as Katja is clapping her hands frantically yelling “Go Go Go!”  Since we did not work out beforehand who was in charge of what, we kept bumping into each other, put the datalogger box in the middle of the road (bad idea), had trouble unlocking the back where the instruments were…all as it started to hail.  The second deployment was a bit smoother…unfortunately the computer program was not started correctly so we didn’t collect any disdrometer data (my bad!) and we deployed the instruments on a tilted surface (the ditch) instead of the necessary flat surface. We were also REALLY slow, so if there was a tornado we may not have been able to fully deploy the instruments! We all had a lot of fun and learned a lot from it…but thank goodness it was practice!



That night we hit the late night AppleBees in Hays …the only place that was open when we rolled into town.  Two probes got stuck in the mud and were finally pulled out around midnight by a friendly local farmer.  So…if you see one of us stranded feel free to pull us out! Usually we don’t go back and rescue people because then we risk getting more of our vehicles stuck!  If you get stuck, mostly likely you’re sleeping there.

From Hays, we left for Amarillo, TX in hopes of being positioned for potential storms today with an off day yesterday. On our off day, we spent some time at a somewhat scary Laundromat…my clothes may have been cleaner before they went into the washer/dryer. We then had a practice deployment in the parking lot with the chance to work out all the kinks before the storms anticipated for Monday.  We were all looking forward to not riding in the car, but our third vehicle broke down for the third time on their way from Dallas, TX.  Our team is now complete though, with the exception of one vehicle in the shop…again!  Luckly, all of the instruments are in a trailer, so we are fully operational now!

We’re on the road again today heading to the next location that seems to have a lot of potential!

Until next time….

1 comment:

  1. That is fantastic! Keep up the adventurous science!

    You get to drive if there is ever a post-apocalyptic desert society starved for gas.

    ReplyDelete