The biggest, most expensive, tech-heavy effort to understand how and why tornadoes form begins next month.

Pulling together truck-mounted radar, UAVs, wind meters bolted to car roofs, webs of stationary sensors and a generous dash of adventure, 100 scientists with 40 vehicles will spend a month tracking the huge formations of clouds called supercells that occasionally spawn twisters. From a mobile field command vehicle, this army of scientists will conduct a data-gathering war on nature's baddest storms.

In the best case scenario, the VORTEX2 project could get the kind of high-resolution, clean data that research weathermen need to understand exactly why some storms generate killer clouds while most just threaten to.

"Never before have we gotten everyone together at the same time to focus on the same storm," said Howie Bluestein, a meterologist at the

University of Oklahoma and a key member "You need to observe many different variables in space on a very, very fine scale while the tornado is forming."

Of all the weather phenomena in the world, the unpredictable, violent and telegenic tornado commands special attention. Tornadogenesis remains mysterious largely because it's hard to have everyone in place at just that moment when the funnel cloud actually forms. If you're not there when it happens — and just as importantly, when it almost happens

— it's difficult to know which variables drive tornado formation. The first VORTEX program, carried out in 1994 to 1995, made some progress on the issue and has been credited with an uptick in the accuracy of tornado warnings since that time.

Tornadoes form within large thunderstorms. These storms tend to start rotating horizontally, but rising warm air moves up through the center of the storm, changing the axis of rotation and creating a vertically rotating column of clouds. But what turns that "rotating wall cloud" into a tornado is a bit of mystery. Scientists have several ideas about the role cool downdrafts and vertical wind shear play in this crucial step from beautiful storm to sublime tornado, but it's a tough problem with relatively limited data sets.

With $9 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, VORTEX2 could change that. It will deploy 40 vehicles into the Oklahoma prairie at one time, including an array of gadgets that work well alone but that together will allow for a new level of understanding. They hope to track up to 20 possibly tornado-producing storms.

"There are some hypotheses out there that can be tested," Bluestein said. "There are also things that we know nothing about that we might serendipitously discover."

The key technology for studying tornadoes is radar. VORTEX2 will use

10 different types of mobile radar systems operating on different wavelengths. The workhorse Doppler (or DOW: Doppler on Wheels) X-band radar systems consist of big, generally parabolic dishes mounted on the backs of large trucks, which are positioned 10 to 20 kilometers from the big storms.

"The main means by which we study tornadoes observationally is to use mobile Doppler radars because we can get close to the tornado without getting in it," Bluestein said. "And we can get a high resolution look at the wind field and a distribution of hydrometeors and debris in and around the tornado."

(Hydrometeor is the catch all term for different types of solid or liquid precipitation — rain, hail, snow, ice, etc. — that tornadoes generate.)



The X-band radar works from long-distances, but its maximum resolution is only in the hundreds of meters. For more detailed work, scientists roll out the W-band.

"This particular radar operates at a very high frequency," Bluestein said. "It's one of a kind and it'll be able to see things at 10 meters across a couple miles away."

While the radar trucks are rumbling towards the scene, fleets of cars with wind speed and temperature sensors mounted on their roofs will also be racing to encircle the storm. It's not recreational tornado chasing, but it does have its dangers, or perks, depending on your constitution.

"Some of them have to drive into bad areas," Bluestein said. "You actually surround the storm, so some of them have to go through the storm, so they'll get battered by hail and heavy rain and so on. While we try and stay out of it, they go into it."

These specially outfitted cars, called mesonets, have been in use since the mid-'90s, but they keep getting computer upgrades. You can watch Sean Waugh, a student researcher at the National Severe Storms

Laboratory and dedicated amateur storm chaser, build a new one from a standard van in the video below.

As the cars and trucks race around, stationary sensors called sticknets will gather data along the routes most likely to be affected by the storm. And over the top of all this action, like drones in the war over Afghanistan, unmanned aerial vehicles will be patrolling the sky, at least in limited action. One might think they'd just get blown out of the sky, but Bluestein is hopeful they'll be able to withstand the atmospheric conditions.

"If they succeed, we'll be able to get thermodynamic measurements that you could never make," he said.

And though the VORTEX2 project has the ultimate purpose of saving lives and the days will be long, there will still be some fun in it for storm-lovers like Waugh who drives 20,000 miles a year chasing clouds, lightning and hail.

"You see a nice, big sculpted storm with a nice tornado underneath and it's chunking out softball-size hail, it's all worth it," Waugh said. "Golf-ball-sized are OK, but we don't really get really excited unless it's baseballs or larger."

See Also:

Image 1: NOAA. Image 2: VORTEX2. Image: NSSL. Video: Sean Waugh.

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