Tornado experiment sees only 1 twister

The first part of the largest attempt to measure tornado activity across the Midwest came to a close this past week.

The experiment went well, except that the weather wasn't nearly as exciting as organizers had hoped.

"The weather kind of sucked — it was a record minimum tornado year," said Louis J. Wicker, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory who is also part of the steering committee for the experiment.

Scientists from Norman, both with the University of Oklahoma and NOAA, and across the country participated in the experiment. They spent five weeks chasing storms across many states, measuring every aspect of the atmosphere during tornadic storms.

The project, Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment2 (VORTEX2 or V2), explored the origins, structure and evolution of tornadoes May 10 through June 13. It will continue with another six weeks next summer, when it is hoped the weather will cooperate more, Wicker said.

"It was a sort of slow year but we're primed for the next year," he said.

VORTEX2 is modeled after VORTEX, which was the first concerted effort to study tornadoes in 1994 and 1995. The research conducted with that data led to many storm prediction innovations. The goal of VORTEX2 is the same, Wicker said.

"We're doing this for science, but we're also doing this for better forecasts and warnings," he said.

The VORTEX2 project involved more than 40 research vehicles and at times as many as 180 people in the field. Because of the coordination challenge for the operations center at the National Weather Center, Wicker said the lack of much severe weather could be seen as a good thing.

"A lot of things went really well," he said. 'The armada worked pretty well together. People worked well together."

Wicker spent the first half of the time at the NWC helping to coordinate VORTEX2. The last part of the experiment, however, he was in the field.

"I was only out for two weeks and it was the most intense thing I've done since my Ph.D.," he said.

The scientists in the field worked 14-hour days seven days a week, Wicker said. They moved to a different location every night.

"It's very high stress, 'cause you're very intense about chasing and getting to the right storm and getting your mission," Wicker said.

The scientists did successfully collect data from one tornado in Wyoming, Wicker said. In addition, they collected good data sets for another three storms that looked like they would develop into tornadoes but did not. That data can be just as important as the data collected from the tornadic storm, Wicker said, because scientists need to understand why tornadoes do and do not develop. "Then we're going to use all that information to figure out how tornadoes work," he said. "Or in this case this year, what they don't look like."

The scientists with VORTEX2 are still hanging their hopes on next year's data collection. Wicker said the steering committee originally planned to do all the field data collection in one summer, but decided about eight months ago to split the time between two summers for a greater chance of storms.

"We feel pretty smart now," he said. "We hedged our bet"

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Julianna Parker Jones
366-3541
jparker@normantranscript.com