VORTEX II: Day 29
Well, today didn’t produce the tornadoes that we thought were certainly possible, but it was a very valuable data nonetheless. The armada spent the night before in Kearney, NE (again). The rationale was that by doing so they could either play eastern Nebraska or western Nebraska. During the conference call, it was decided to target the storms in eastern Nebraska, since they held the most promise for tornadoes (or at least this is what we thought).
The armada left fairly early for Beatrice, NE, and while enroute decided to retarget to Auburn, NE. Around the time they arrived in Auburn, the first thunderstorm of the day developed in eastern, northcentral Kansas. This thunderstorm quickly became a supercell. To its southeast, another thunderstorm developed and this one also quickly became a supercell. The armada watched both of these storms very closely and decided to target (rightfully so) the southeastern storm.
The armada targeted this storm the from around 5PM CDT until sunset (~9 PM CDT). It had all the characteristics of a tornadic supercell (hail 4.5″ and larger included!), but for some reason struggled to produce a tornado. Near Amity, MO, one of the Dopplers on Wheels observed a brief “tornado-like vortex” that knocked a few branches down onto the road. While officially a tornado, this is certainly not the type of tornado that the VORTEX II crew envisioned targeting. However, even though the armada didn’t observe a classic tornado, this dataset is invaluable because of it being a great “null case”. In my opinion, the data collected today is more valuable than the data collected in Wyoming on the tornado. Ths is because on both days the forecast called for tornadoes. The Wyoming day produced a tornado, while the Missouri day did not. Examining the Missouri dataset might help us understand what was different in the environment and help us forecast tornado outbreak days better in the future.
I can’t wait to see the results from this!
