Saturday, April 3, 2010

4 Week Countdown!


Greetings everybody! With one month to go until the official start of VORTEX2 2010 (May 1st), I thought I'd get things updated once more. When we last left our scientists, we'd had a single successful tornado intercept in Goshen County, Wyoming on June 5, 2009. We got an EF-scale rating of EF-2 thanks to the DOWs and the TIV. There was also major windshield damage done to a couple mobile mesonets. For some good images and review (in addition to my own!), go here: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=cys&storyid=28445&

Hopefully we will have many more storms like Goshen this year! No one was hurt, only minor damage, etc. The CSWR crew meets up in Boulder, CO on April 26th, and I have a million things to do in West Lafayette before then. Research-wise, I am working on submitting two papers to two different academic journals in addition to getting preliminary results done for my regular research. One paper is coming from my undergraduate research where we looked at mesoscale convective systems in West Africa as they make the land-ocean transition; these storms can then develop into tropical storms. We will hopefully have that submitted to Monthly Weather Review before I leave for Vortex. The other paper I'm working on came out of a mini field project associated with my fall 2009 radar meteorology class at Purdue. We were given DOW7 for a month and were given the freedom to do whatever we wanted with it (almost). My team of students and a friend's team of students decided to determine the impact of a local wind farm on DOW observations of clear air and precipitation. We got some interesting results that we'll be submitting to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) by the end of this summer at the latest. As for my day-to-day research, I'm using a combination of DOW and WSR-88D radar data to investigate tornadic wind speeds. I'll leave it at that for now... ;)


Looking at DOW scans in SoloII

That is what I will leave you with for a few more weeks. Until then, be sure to check out these websites:

My YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/MetNightOwl

Matt's blog
http://rydzblog.com/

VORTEX2 page
http://vortex2.org/home/

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