Day 161: Oklahoma Heat Burst
Originally I planned to blog tonight about VORTEX 2′s deployment and successful intercept of a supercell and tornado in northeast Colorado. (Ironically, this successful intercept occurred near Last Chance, Colorado!). However, details of how successful the deployment was are still a little sparse. I do know that the tornado was observed by many pieces of the armada, however it will be a few days before we know just how good the data collection actually was. The armada went a long way today – starting in Chadron, Nebraska and going as far south as several miles south of Last Chance, Colorado – so I’m extremely happy for them.
Since I don’t have any good images of the VORTEX 2 deployment, I thought I’d display a meteogram from Beaver, Oklahoma. A meteogram displays a time series of meteorological data for a given station for multiple fields. This meteogram displays temperature (red) and dewpoint (green) in the top panel; sustained wind speed (dark blue), maximum wind gust (light blue), and wind direction (diamonds) in the second panel; surface pressure (brown) in the third panel; accumulated rainful (light green) in the fourth panel; and incoming solar radiation (orange) and approximate maximum possible incoming radiation (grey) in the bottom panel.
This meteogram is special in that it captured a rare atmospheric phenomenon known as a heat burst. In a heat burst the temperature increases rapidly, the air becomes really dry (dewpoint falls), wind speed quickly increases, and often times the pressure changes. All of this occurred at Beaver, OK this evening when an apparent heat burst affected the area. Oklahoma is very lucky to have the Oklahoma Mesonet so that we can record such awesome atmospheric phenomena!
