It’s been a busy week for the Vortex 2 team! As I’m sure most of you saw on either the Weather Channel or maybe even your local news station, there was a major tornado outbreak in central Oklahoma and along the Kansas/Oklahoma border on Monday. Central Oklahoma provides some logistical challenges for the Vortex 2 team. There are a lot of trees and hills, making it difficult to find a good place to deploy the radars and also visually see the storms develop. However, we were in the perfect location, ready for our first deployment in rotating supercell. Unfortunately, we had a communication issue and missed the storm that produced a large wedge tornado. Wireless reception is patchy in this area, so it was difficult to see the radar and communicate with our coordinators. We deployed in a storm that was farther North, and by the time we were able to pick up our 7 instruments we were too late. The good news, this was the first storm we successfully deployed all of our instruments! We came across roads with closures due to powerlines in the roads (we drove underneath one…pretty intense), tree limbs, and the power line poles. We had to turn around and call it a day because of the extremely fast movement of the storm and all of the roads were closed due to damage. I’ve only seen tornado damage on TV, so it’s really intense to experience it first hand. It is an eye opening experience and reminds me of why we are all out here. The exhausting days filled with early mornings to prepare the instruments and late nights after chasing seem like a small thing after you see with your own eye the damage these storms are capable of.
To top off this overwhelming experience, we got back to the hotel only to find out that our hotel and a majority of the restaurants were without power. We were able to grab a bite to eat at a Chili’s down the road, but were without power in our room for the entire night and morning. No breakfast, showers, or air conditioning…but this is a small discomfort compared to the people who lost their homes.
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Tuesday seemed like it would be a pretty boring day, but after playing the “hurry up and wait game” things started to initiate in western Oklahoma. We all got excited when one storm looked like it was going to explode, but it died before it reached supercell status. Luckly, we were able to find a new target storm that had a lot of potential. We were able to deploy all of our instruments in the ideal part of the storm. While waiting for the storm to pass, we drove south to get a perfect view of the structure of the storm with some amazing intracloud lighting! It was a very late night chase though…well after dark when we picked up our instruments. This chase led us far into the middle of nowhere, but we were able to find a Sonic on the drive to our hotel only a few minutes before they closed at 11! We were able to get a shower for the first time since Monday morning….amazing!
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Today (Wednesday) was our third chase day in a row. For details of today check out the CU link: http://clouds.colorado.edu/vortex-blog
Today we had media in our backseat (Christian who is working on a German documentary).
I also was filmed getting the instruments ready in Wichita Falls, TX today: http://texomashomepage.com/fulltext/?nxd_id=85675
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