Day 74: New army of tornado chasers targets Midwest

I’ll probably never forget that hour in my living room, in the middle of the night in Cullman, Alabama (population about 10,000). The rain drops were so big they sounded like hail on the roof and windows (and might have been), and a city-wide siren was going off — a martial-law type sound accompanied by strobe lights and lightning. 

At 3:49 a.m., the National Weather Service Doppler radar had spotted a tornado near Bug Tussle. I’m still not sure where Bug Tussle is. But Cullman was among the warning areas.

“Tornadoes at night are especially dangerous,” the warning admonished. “Do not wait until you see or hear the tornado… it may be too late. Take cover now.”

I didn’t really know how to respond to that. You see, I lived in an upstairs apartment. And even if I braved the wind, rain, lightning and possibly an oncoming tornado to descend the outside staircase and knock on a downstairs neighbor’s door, I didn’t have any guarantees that they would be willing to emerge from their interior hiding places (or their beds) to let me in.  And so I sat bolt upright in my recliner, in my raincoat, and periodically refreshed weather.com on my computer screen. And I played the same odds games that have calmed me when I’ve been stuck in my tent in lightning storms. (What are the odds, that of all the roofs that could get ripped off or caved in by this particular tornado, that mine would be pegged?)

At 4 a.m., the radar continued to indicate a tornado. This tornado was located near Good Hope, or about 9 miles south of Cullman, moving northeast at 45 mph. By 5 a.m., it was clear that the worst of the storm – meaning the winds – had skirted the southeast side of town. The sirens got quiet. And so I took off my raincoat and went back to bed.

Somewhere around 100 people die each year in tornadoes in the United States; many more are injured. Alabama isn’t even in the “red zone;” it’s 13th in the national statistics for tornadoes and tornado deaths. As hard as people have worked — including NASA and the National Weather Service — to boost their abilities to predict tornadoes, they’ve only added minutes to the lead time they’re able to issue to people in the path. Many times, tornadoes still go under the radar. If people don’t see them, it’s hard to tell afterwards whether an area was hit by a tornado or just fierce winds.

A new, coordinated national tornado research effort could change all that. 

The new project, Verification of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2 (VORTEX2 or V2), is the largest and most ambitious attempt to study tornadoes in history. More than 50 scientists and 40 research vehicles, including 10 mobile radars, will converge on the central United States May 10 through June 13. Their $10.5 million goal: to explore the origins, structure and evolution of tornadoes. 

The original VORTEX program, operated in the central Great Plains during 1994 and 1995, documented the entire life cycle of a tornado for the first time in history. Program press materials say recent improvements in National Weather Service severe weather warning statistics may be partly due to the application of VORTEX findings. V2 will build on the progress made during VORTEX, and further improve tornado warnings and short-term severe weather forecasts.

The scientists will sample the environment of supercell thunderstorms — violent thunderstorms capable of producing damaging winds, large hail, and tornadoes — that form over more than 900 miles of the central Great Plains. Areas of focus include southern South Dakota, western Iowa, eastern Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma. The V2 Operations Center will be at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

“New advances will allow for a more detailed sampling of a storm’s wind, temperature and moisture environment and lead to a better understanding of why tornadoes form – and how they can be more accurately predicted,” said Stephan Nelson, the National Science Foundation program director for physical and dynamic meteorology.

Preliminary results from V2 are scheduled for presentation at Penn State University during fall 2009. At that time, organizers will begin planning details of the second phase of V2 scheduled for May 1-June 15, 2010.

For more information about the experiments, including the massive list of participants, visit the project web sites here and here.