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| Fox_Weather_News's Blog |
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This week, more than 100 scientists from across the nation traded their offices for a nomadic lifestyle. Roving across the Great Plains in search of tornado-spawning severe weather, these real-life tornado chasers must be tolerance to fast food and flexible with sleeping arrangements.
The members of the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 (VORTEX2) will patrol an area encompassing over eleven states (pictured below) to better understand how tornadoes work.
This field experiment, the largest of its kind, aims to alleviate uncertainty that still exists about how, when, and why tornadoes form. From their research, the scientists hope to forecast tornado warnings more accurately and more in advance. Currently, the average advance warning time for a tornado is only 13 minutes.
Research will be done with vehicles known as mobile mesonets. These vehicles will have weather instruments, secured on their roofs, to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, and the exact vehicle location. These surface condition measurements will provide more information about the relationships between supercell storms and their environments. To be labeled a supercell, the thunderstorm must have strong updraft rotation. Supercells are the culprits for nearly all storms that produce tornadoes or hail over two inches in diameter.
So far, the team had one "go" day, which meant there was a storm strong enough to produce a tornado. After the team trekked from central Oklahoma to northern Texas, they determined that the storm had enough CAPE but too much CIN. There are more complicating factors, but CAPE and CIN are crude ways to determine if a tornado will form. CAPE measures the instability in the atmosphere while CIN measures the stability.
The scientists will be chasing tornadoes until June 13, and I'll keep you updated on the team's progress. For daily updates and pictures check out the VORTEX2 Facebook fan page.
Drew Anderson Penn State Meteorologist and Fox Weather Correspondent
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