Storm Chasers risk their lives to collect data
April 29, 2008
Mizzou Storm Chase Team members meet at the Weather Analysis and Visualization Laboratory on April 2 to do independent forecasting. Team members analyze different weather models to predict if the storm will produce something worth chasing.
Rain gets wrapped up into the center of a mesocyclone near Scotland, Texas, on April 7. A mesocyclone is a large vortex of spinning air that is often associated with heavy wind and hail.
Chasers watch a passing storm system near Sherman, Texas, on April 3 during one of their first chases of the season. The area of sun indicates large downdrafts in the tail of the system, which is favorable for tornadoes.
Taylor Trogdon, senior atmospheric sciences major and Mizzou Storm Chase Team president, updates chasers on the storm's activity. A map sits close by to help direct chasers to new locations.
(Click graphic to enlarge)
Buried deep within the labyrinth of halls, labs and various classrooms of the Agriculture Building lies the Weather Analysis and Visualization Laboratory, or as students call it the WAV lab. It is a room full of whirring computers and old weather models that is home to the Mizzou Storm Chase Team.
It is in this lab that the team will meet when severe weather conditions emerge in the Great Plains region. This is where they start their race against Mother Nature.
“When we meet people on the road they usually ask us if it’s like the movie ‘Twister,’” says Taylor Trogdon, senior atmospheric science student and president of the Mizzou Storm Chase Team. “It’s not at all like that. We don’t end up strapped to some poles, lifted up by a tornado and eventually having the eye of the tornado pass over us. It’s a bit more complicated.”
In fact it is extremely complicated.
Finding a tornado covers hundreds of miles. Only with the help of sophisticated national weather data can the team accurately predict where a certain system might produce the best outcome, and not all chases are successful. The weather can change in a moment’s notice so it comes down to the work of the entire team, chasers and base team, to witness some of the greatest forces our earth has to offer.
Briefing
When a system begins to show the signs of producing severe weather, there is a color-coded regiment that the team operates on. A code yellow means members will continue to watch a storm system and track it. Code yellow is usually announced the day prior to a chase. Code red is issued once the conditions of the storm have been deemed favorable for severe weather and can be issued at anytime. A code green is the “go code” for the chase team to assemble and begin their trip to a predicted target location. The time the “go code” is initiated is determined at the briefing.
When the code yellow is issued, any available member will convene in the WAV lab and begin to do independent weather forecasting. There are roughly 2,200 land weather stations in the U.S. that collect data and feed it to several different sources, creating a huge matrix of weather information.
The data is compiled and forms different “weather models” that forecasters can look at to obtain information. These models can show anything from temperature and dew point, to wind speeds, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover and just about anything else weather related.
The members of the team will look at several different models and begin to predict where the best location for severe weather will occur. After about an hour, the members will converge and share their information. When they finish, they come to two conclusions.
The first is whether chasing is worth it, or even possible. Often times members will have school-related conflicts. If chasing is a reasonable idea and there are members willing to go out, the second decision is settling on a target city or location. The target location is a rough guess and is mainly used to map out road directions for the team. It’s almost always not the city or town that sees the worst of the severe weather.
After the target location is determined the team members willing to chase are divided up into teams. On average two or three teams are sent depending on availability of vehicles. Many early season chases are in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas and the team will usually depart Columbia around four or five in the morning.
The remaining members who could not chase are assigned time slots to work as base team members. They will come into the WAV lab during the day on two-hour shifts and watch the storm system that the team is en route. It is their responsibility to guide the team since they have the up-to-the-minute information about the storm. They watch the same models they used to predict the storm and, using atlases, guide the team to the best possible viewing location.
The base team will continue watching the storm until the chasers finish the chase and begin the trip home. Much of the time, nightfall is the cause for the chase team to call off the chase.
Chasing
“I chase storms to better understand how they work," sophomore atmospheric sciences student Stuart Miller says. “Tornado formation is vaguely understood at best, and we don’t know everything that causes them to form. If we can better understand this, we can better prepare people for when they hit.”
Departing MU at 4:45 a.m. on a Thursday is not uncommon for the chase team. In early chase season, severe weather usually breaks out as far south as Texas and the team usually wants to arrive by mid afternoon. Severe weather needs a fair amount of time in the sun to develop. Most tornadoes will touchdown in the afternoon or early evening.
The Mizzou Storm Chase team gets very little funding and is driven by the financial support of its members. They provide their own vehicles and pay for their own gas. Usually pressed for time, their diet consists of gas station food and caffeine intakes reach an all-time high. Driving 25 hours round-trip isn’t unheard of.
During the trip down, the chase team is in constant communication with the base team via cell phones. Meteorology jargon is passed on like a foreign language, in between confusing directions. They are receiving updates about the storm’s movement as well as target location changes. It might seem like chaos and confusion, but the members will tell you it’s all part of the chase.
Ideally, they want the storm to be in front them as it passes, rather than over them. In severe weather that produces tornadoes, hail can reach softball size and present a serious risk to the team. It might not be like the movies, but it can be dangerous.
The chase team will follow the storm cell as long as they can, or until they are turned on to a different cell by the base team. More often than not, several cells will become more and more favorable for severe weather as the day progresses. One cell might lose energy and become less favorable while another close by picks up more energy. In this case, the base team will reroute the chase team to its new location.
“I think the best part would be when we finally saw the super cell after all the tension and buildup,” freshman atmospheric sciences freshman Konrad Hughes says after his first chase with the team.
Some of the team’s members own GPS navigation systems, but they often find themselves on backcountry roads that aren’t programmed into the GPS. Finding one-lane wooden bridges over the Red River in back country Texas are more common than tornadoes themselves.
“The worst part was getting lost in Texas for a while,” Hughes says.
The Aftermath
While the majority of expenses come from the pockets of its members, the Mizzou Storm Chase Team does get some funding from the Department of Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences. Recently they bought some new equipment for the team.
This equipment, coupled with the team’s knowledge of storm structures, can help them take readings of their own. Equipment like anemometers and aerovanes, tools that measure wind speed and direction, and barometers, an instrument used to calculate atmospheric pressure, are now at the team’s disposal.
Much of the data meteorologists look at is taken from radars and weather stations that could be hundreds of miles from the actual system. Being able to take exact readings on location is invaluable.
So when those tornado sirens go off, the Mizzou Storm Chasers are grabbing data and observations of their own and hoping to, one day, help scientists better understand Mother Nature’s awesome power.
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