May 3, 2010
Day One:
Started in Nashville, TN and caught a flight at 5:45 in the morning to DIA. Filled out some paperwork in Boulder, met Stephanie and we were on our way.
Stephanie and I joined the team a few days later than the project started on May 1 due to weekend obligations. We started from Boulder with a a very big Ford pickup, wired with internet, radios, a perfectly small laptop....and only a music radio. No place to plug in the ipod, put in a cd, not even going old school to a cassette player....just the radio. After driving to Garden City, KS we decided we had enough of the radio and made a pit stop at Walmart to buy some speakers...best investment on the trip so far! We can now go back to the "new" world and listen to ipods and even stream live music from the computer! We had a few adventures along the way, driving over the curb (bigger than we thought), not being able to take the key out, start the engine, or lock up the back. However, we made it after only a couple of U-turns to Woodward, OK in about 10 hours.
There are two main highlights of my day: 1) The A-MAZING sandwich I had for lunch, stopping at Costco was a great idea; and 2) Arriving at the Northwest Motel after a very long day and seeing all the chasing vehicles...hello DOW!! This is what girls dream about ladies and gentleman...until next time!
Day two: May 4
Woodward OK: Still in Woodward, OK. We had a fairly lazy morning with a chance to catch up on sleep from the long day of travel yesterday. The Northwest Inn is a pretty good place to stay, only downside is the lack of internet that consistently works and they made us all check out this morning and check back in to different rooms today. There are A LOT of us though, I think we booked 70 rooms last night.
The parking lot is a fantastic place here! You walk outside the door and the DOW and other radar trucks are testing operations, the mobile nets with all the instruments on top, pickups filled with instruments….a sight to see for sure! The locals always wave and stare, we definitely stand out everywhere we go!
Today we had a chance to learn about deployment procedures and the instrument checks we need to do before we start chasing and deploy. It’s the typical, make sure the computers are charged, batteries work, instruments’ time and GPS are all coordinated. The disdrometers use a single diode laser and a single receiver to measure precipitation drop size and velocity. The tornado pods have a temperature and relative humidity sensor (identical to the one I set up on the roof of NSSTC), a sonic anemometer, a regular anemometer, and a barometer with a GPS device located on the pod. We deploy each pod and disdrometer together, take a picture of the set-up, and then write our GPS location down. The goal is to deploy every 0.5-1km, following the path of the storm. Our main location of deployment is north of the mesocyclone…usually about 5-10 minutes in front of where a tornado typically forms. Rest assured, the actual tornado pod teams are deployed 3-4 minutes before tornado formation, so I don’t have the most dangerous job! Plus, we have some good people watching out for us!
We were also filmed today by the Japanese media making a documentary about the Vortex 2 project. We did a fake deployment in the parking lot for them, with Katja explaining the instrumentation and purpose after we deployed. They follow so closely that I almost ran right into the camera guy when I turned around after putting the laptop back in the pickup! It was fun...but having media in your face all the time is not something I'm use to!
We have the evening off and a late start for the morning again. No storms tomorrow either, but it is a travel day.
Until next time…check out these websites to track us!
My PI (Katja) will be keeping a blog here: http://clouds.colorado.edu/
The official project blog is here: http://tornadoscientists.
The Weather Channel: http://www.weather.com/
This is extremely important: what type of sandwich was it?
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