VORTEX-2 Tornado Study on Track for 2009-2010

Susan Cobb
National Severe Storms Laboratory

December 4, 2008 — NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., is gearing up for the largest ever field program to study tornadoes:  VORTEX-2 (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment-2, or V2). V2 is set to run from May 10 - June 15 of 2009 and 2010, and will follow up on the VORTEX project of the mid 1990s designed to study how tornadoes form and dissipate.
 

V2 will target potentially tornadic storms in the U.S. Central Plains and canvass the area with an armada of instruments including radars, mobile vehicles equipped with instruments, instrumented weather balloons and unmanned aerial vehicles.

The project will focus on gaining new insight about how, when, and why tornadoes form; why some thunderstorms produce tornadoes and others do not; the structure of tornadoes; and the relationship of tornadic winds to damage.  Answers to these questions will help improve forecasts and warnings of tornadoes.

NSSL organized field testing of V2 communications and data sharing technologies during spring 2008 in V2RAMP (the V2-Risk Analysis and Mitigation Program).  During V2RAMP operations, Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching Radar (SMART-R) volumetric data were observed in real-time in the Hazardous Weather Testbed in Norman, and mobile vehicles collected data on a storm in southern Kansas.  Field testing was an important step to assure quality data will be collected during the field phase of V2 next spring.  

"V2 has an even greater opportunity to help increase warning lead times. We will have ten times as many instruments observing the storm as the original VORTEX program, which should enable us to greatly further our understanding of tornadic storms," says NSSL researcher Lou Wicker.

Norman National Weather Service Meteorologist-In-Charge Mike Foster confirms that "VORTEX has positively impacted forecast operations."

For more than 30 years, researchers at NSSL and other facilities have been working to unravel the mysteries of tornado formation.