The Formal Weather Pattern

A recap of the week between my last recap and this past Tuesday

Thursday

CSWR was responsible for the second set of missions summaries for the project. We picked the three most interesting cases from the time period since Texas Tech presented missions summaries and began analyzing data. Karen told us to block out our days from noon to 6 P.M., and honestly we could have gone longer (some people did). In three separate groups we worked on the following cases:

May 20th Alliance, NE Supercell
May 23rd Ogallala, NE Multicell
May 26th Dallas, TX Supercell

We then joined the mesonet group at Boss Hawg’s BBQ in Topeka, KS for dinner. Afterwards a group of us hung out in the hotel’s game area playing pool and watched Andrew and Josh win all the stuffed animals out of the crane game. The night before they’d won 24 animals and the hotel had to refill the game!

Baller

Friday

Friday…what a day. We drove 615 miles from Topeka, KS to Grand Island, NE……..then further to go after our best target. Some decent pictures, and I figured out that I have a panorama option on my camera, so that was what I got out of that day. Haha. Otherwise just a very exhausting day.

Not too bad.

Saturday

Saturday was supposed to be a down day, but we (CSWR) had to work on our presentations. Try analyzing all the available data from the largest tornado field experiment in history in two days and see how long it takes you. The presentations went really well! Afterwards I joined some of the Penn State and OU kids for dinner at Balz Sports Bar (they answer the phone: “You’ve got Balz.”). After dinner we went back to the hotel and hung out in the hotel bar with the rest of V2 (professors and principal investigators included) and eventually wandered around hanging out in different people’s rooms. At some point we ran into Katie Tur from The Weather Channel and a couple of the Discovery Channel camera guys and hung out in the hallway with them for awhile.

Sunday

My first trip to Iowa! We left Grand Island, NE and stopped at a truck stop to await convection. While we were there the IMAX crew worked on getting shots. Apparently they have to do the sound and video separately, so we were asked to continue our conversations as if they weren’t there with a large mic in our face. Karen eventually jumped out of DOW7 going “We’re leaving!” at which point no one moved. She looked at us and goes “We’re leaving, really! What’s going on?” Everyone was like “…They’re trying to film…can we move yet?” The camera guy yelled “It’s ok, it’ll be good! Hold on…………ok you can go!” and we scattered. It was very funny to watch! So that should be a good scene, hahaha.

From there we caravaned towards Iowa, where we hung out in a Hardee’s parking lot. Everyone got a milkshake, so I don’t think they cared too much that we invaded. Mike Bettes walked over and taped a banana peel on the ground next to Chris…….not sure what that was for. Then we went after a storm…and it was lame…so we undeployed towards our Hilton hotel in Omaha. So nice! Most of CSWR then wandered around in downtown Omaha looking for an open restaurant at 10 P.M. on a Sunday night. We split up but eventually all ended up at this place called M’s pub, which was no pub. I was glad I changed into a nicer shirt since the first one got sweaty from 3 hours in the parking lot, because it was a little more upscale than we expected. I had a Caribbean Shrimp Satay on fried basmati rice with a creamy mango sauce and salad with blueberry vinaigrette…fancy! But less than 15 bucks with tip.

Monday

We left the Hilton in Omaha, NE and moved toward York, NE. There we spent another couple of hours in a Walmart parking lot. Which was convenient because I was running out of shampoo, haha. A few of us attempted to throw the frisbee around for awhile, but I’m bad enough as it is, and the wind kept grabbing it. Others tossed the football around, but most of the time spent laying around on the grass. I have a nice sunglasses tan now. After that we moved south towards what visually appeared to be a promising storm, but we abandoned within the hour.

Salina, KS was our destination for the evening. There were rumors of an early (5 A.M.) departure the next morning so we went to fill up in the gas station next to us. The owner came out and told us she thought she was out of gas; I laughed and warned her that there were about 45 vehicles following us that would want to fill up. What a business loss! We then invaded Chili’s. I got my meal for free because they messed it up, but I left a $5 tip anyway since I didn’t have any smaller bills and didn’t want to leave nothing. We got texts that we would not be leaving early on Tuesday, which bothered a few people that were afraid we would miss a good opportunity in Texas on Tuesday.