Next May, Lyndon State College Meteorology Professor Nolan Atkins and two Lyndon students will travel to Norman, Okla., where they will take part in a large national study on the formation of tornadoes. Atkins and the students, Tony McGee of Penacook, N.H., and Rachel Ducharme of Charlestown, R.I., are among about 20 other scientists in the study. The National Science Foundation has underwritten Atkins study for three years with a grant of $239,000. During the first two years, Atkins will collect data for his portion of the study, and the third year will be used for analysis.
“This is an important study,” Atkins says. “At this point, it is very difficult to predict with any accuracy when and where a tornado will form. That is why these storms not only wreak so much devastation when they hit a populated area, such as the recent tornadoes in Oklahoma, but they often take lives. With accurate predictions, these lives can be saved.” Even though it is known that the vast majority of tornadoes form out of supercell thunderstorms, which can be predicted, tornadoes only appear from supercells about 30 percent of the time.
The study is called VORTEX 2, for Verification of the Origins of Tornadoes Experiment. During the 2009 portion of the three-year study, the scientists will gather in Oklahoma, watch the weather and pick a potential storm to chase. Once there, they will split up to perform their various tasks. Some will bring mobile Doppler radar trucks, some will have ground sensing equipment, some will have vehicles with special instrumentation to drive in and around the storm and one team will bring an unmanned aircraft that will be guided through the storm.
Atkins, McGee and Ducharme are responsible for documenting the funnel cloud and the debris cloud and for a damage assessment following the storm. Part of their data collection will rely on photographs taken with a 20 mega pixel digital SLR camera, providing very high resolution images that can be enlarged for study. They will also over-fly the area after the storm in a rented Cessna 172 and take photographs of the area where the storm did the most damage to plot patterns and determine the storm track.
During February winter break in Atkins will attend the first planning meeting for VORTEX 2 in Boulder, Colo. The group has many decisions to make, such as how to determine which storm to follow and how to strategically collect the information they need.
