Day 141: Another Deployment on a Tornado Warned Storm

Posted by pmarsh on 21 May 2010 | 1 comment

Today is day 21 of VORTEX II and, once again, V2 deployed on a thunderstorm that had a tornado warning.  The storm produced several brief tornadoes before reaching the VORTEX II deployment (which was limited by a poor road network).  I’m not sure what data was collected tonight because the crew is still on their way to the hotels.  It appears they will have another long day and drive tomorrow.

Following on with my blog post last night, tonight’s image attempts to capture some of what I was discussing regarding chaser convergence. The image above is from far southeast Wyoming – where V2 was operating today. This is and area that is relatively rural, unlike central Oklahoma. Theoretically there should be fewer people out chasing storms up here since the number of “locals” out for a look-see would be lower. Even if this is true, the number of “chasers” (and only those who were transmitting their positions via the internet) was astonishing for such a marginal day in an out of way place.

The white letters (and a couple of the yellow ones) indicate the positions of the V2 armada vehicles. For the most part, they are all in advance of the storm. All of the car icons and video camera icons indicate the position of chasers. There are no where near the number of chasers as there were in central Oklahoma on Wednesday, but there are a lot more than I would have expected in such a remote chasing area. The number of chasers on the roads is certainly increasing rapidly…

My post regarding the incidents on Wednesday and the comments that followed on Thursday will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m currently working on around 15 hours of sleep in the last 90 hours – and almost all of this work was VORTEX II related. I promise, however, that the blog post will be coming soon.