Happy anniversary, everyone!
…you do remember what happened on June 5th, 2009, right? On that day in Goshen County, Wyoming, VORTEX2 had a very successful deployment on a tornado that lasted over 30 minutes and was rated as an EF-2 (on a scale of 0 to 5). It ended up being the only case that the LSC/NCAR Photogrammetry team had to analyze from the 2009 campaign. That work is still being done, and we have found some really fascinating things by combining our high-resolution photos and video with the mobile Doppler radar data.
But now back to our current data collection! We are still waiting for another good case. As I mentioned in the last post, we have adopted a new, more aggressive operations strategy that will hopefully enable us to intercept more storms and collect more data. Recently, we have targeted several storms in Nebraska. Unfortunately, mot of these storms did not remain isolated, meaning that there were numerous other storms in the vicinity and they ended up combining into one large storm system. These are very difficult for us to collect data on.
The weather now brings us into Iowa, and we are currently further east than we have been at any point during the project. Happy anniversary…here’s to a repeat of last year’s June 5th!