Jun 30, 2009 6:56 pm US/Eastern
UMass Storm Chasers Sweep The Plains
BOSTON (WBZ) ―
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Fraiser's team -- made up of three graduate students -- operated two out of the 10 mobile radars used in the research armada.
WBZ
UMass Amherst radar experts have just returned from the biggest tornado chase in history. During May and early June, Project VORTEX 2, as the "chase" is being called, gathered over 100 storm experts and an armada of chase equipment to gather critical data to help save lives.
With a price tag over $10 million, this was the largest, most ambitious effort ever attempted to try to better understand nature's most violent winds.
TEAM USES RADAR EQUIPMENT TO MEASURE TORNADOS
"The objective was to throw everything at the storm to try to measure everything in the entire environment," said radar expert Steve Fraiser, head of UMASS Amherst's Remote Sensing Lab. "Using equipment from a host of different resources, the idea was to do storm surveillance on a variety of scales."
Fraiser's team -- made up of three graduate students -- operated two out of the 10 mobile radars used in the research armada.
"The W Band Radar is a very high frequency radar meaning it has a very narrow beam. It has the finest resolution of any of the radars in VORTEX 2," explained Fraiser.
"This allows us to really probe through the detailed structure of the funnel, but rain can interrupt the signal so the radar has to be located close to the storm in just the right spot. That can be difficult," he added. "The other radar is an X Band Radar. It operates at a lower frequency and longer wavelength. This allows us to discriminate between rain and hail or debris that may be picked up by a tornado. It's easier to position--we can be farther away. Most of the radars that were participating in VORTEX were X Bands like ours."
"The equipment takes a beating. Everyone is busy keeping things working," explained Fraiser.
DAILY LIVING PART OF THE CHALLENGE
But beyond the equipment challenges, daily living also proved difficult. I asked Vijay Venkatesh, one of the engineering grad students responsible for radar operations, what the most difficult part of the chase was.
"I think it was the 6 weeks on the road -- 6 weeks away from home. We ate poorly and slept little," he recalled.
The radar team clocked some 16,000 miles over the several weeks that VORTEX 2 ran.
"That is about 300 miles a day -- 12 to 14 hours on the road, in a new town every night," added Venkatesh.
"There was someone in charge of reserving hotel rooms every night. The joke was that we were applying some fiscal stimulus to the Midwest," chuckled Fraiser.
STUDENTS FACED WITH TORNADO DROUGHT
But the working conditions were only part of the challenge. The atmosphere did not want to produce -- in fact, there was a tornado "drought."
"This year May was unusual. It is normally the month with the max tornadic activity on the southern Great Plains. This season the pattern was more like late June. The team was getting really frustrated. We didn't see anything for weeks," confessed Fraiser.
"Tornado chasing is a combination of state of the art technology and a good bit of luck," said engineering grad student Kryzysztof Orzel, another member of the radar team. "It's a great opportunity to test your devices in the field."
Finally on June 5, in the state of Wyoming they got their chance.
"We got to collect data right through the life cycle of a tornado on the ground. It lasted about 25 minutes. It was very exciting," remarked Venkatesh. "Although it was visually spectacular, our primary motivation was to get a good data set and we did," he added. "You build this radar equipment with your own hands and then you see stuff with it -- it's extremely gratifying."
"Ultimately, you'd like to improve the warning. Right now the average warning time for tornadoes is 14 minutes," said Fraiser.
In New England, the lead time is only 2 minutes.
"Another problem is that the false alarm rate on tornado warnings is extremely high--around 80 to 85 percent. We want to see those numbers improve," Fraiser concluded.
The UMass Amherst radar team will spend the summer analyzing the data and the winter improving radar operations in anticipation of phase two which begins in May 2010.
The original VORTEX took place in 1994-1995 and captured the full life cycle of a tornado for the first time. The research effort was also the inspiration for the movie "Twister."
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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