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Storm Chaser: One Hummer H3T Helps Scientists Gather Data in Tornado Alley
By Phil Berg
Photography by Phil Berg
RAF helicopter combat pilot Jacqui Wilmshurst left the military when the demand for chopper pilots dropped after the Brits scaled back involvement in the second Iraq war. “I never thought I would be able to use all the skills I developed flying a military helicopter, but this is it,” she explains, leaning against a six-wheel cab-on-frame truck with a large radar dish rising from its frame at a wayside rest stop in Kansas. “We have to navigate unknown territory, we have to be moving all day, we have to keep to a rigorous schedule, getting little sleep, and we have to focus sharply on the weather.”Wilmshurst is speaking of the tasks she must do while storm chasing, a growing adrenaline-producing hobby and science that occurs every spring in the Great Plains of the U.S. Midwest. Chasing tornadoes has to be done by car or truck, driving sometimes 650 miles day after day, making decisions that predict the future of the day’s weather. Wilmshurst used a project called VORTEX2 as research for her new career, which she started at England’s University of Sheffield, the coursework for which delves into the psychology of fear caused by nature. Tornado Alley is the perfect environment for this. Every year in the United States, about 1000 or so tornadoes touch down. A handful of these are strong enough to wipe out entire towns. Before the latest Nexrad radar of 1988, every tornado was a surprise, some killing hundreds as they destroyed small towns in minutes. The majority of these killer twisters take place in the unique environment of the Great Plains, where warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cold air cascading down the Rockies at the beginning of every summer. Nowhere else in the world is there the volume of tornadoes as in this 900-mile-square area. When the entire town of Greensburg, Kansas, was demolished two years ago, just nine residents were killed that night, plus a police officer rushing toward the town to offer aid. Everyone else was warned and bunkered down.But the average warning is only about 13 minutes, according to the VORTEX2 (Verification Of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2) scientists. Another 60 or so students and researchers assisted the project, utilizing 40 vehicles, all specially outfitted for gathering weather data. The data will help scientists lengthen warning times and improve tornado prediction accuracy. Fourteen of the 40 vehicles were intended to drive as close to a tornado as possible, deploy portable instrument pods, and then scoot away. Nine of these, however, are government minivans with plenty of space for computer equipment—but they are overloaded front-drivers with highway tires thrust into an environment filled with flash flooded dirt roads in the rural Midwest. This year, Dr. Joshua Wurman, head of the Center for Severe Weather Research, selected a Hummer H3T as the 14th “probe” vehicle, responsible for deploying instruments during high-risk thunderstorms and in the paths of oncoming tornadoes, in places where previous probe vehicles have not been able to do so safely. The five-week VORTEX2 project received $12 million in funding, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and included 10 radar-equipped trucks from CSWR, universities in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Texas and the U.S. Navy. Fourteen instrumented 4WD vehicles carried 42 deployable instrument packs, such as 120-pound “pods” (similar to those in the 1995 movie “Twister,” based on the original VORTEX project of 1993), and weather balloons from the government, and damage survey teams of veteran researchers. I was invited to join for the deployment. About half of the large storms the VORTEX2 teams identified last spring, but did not chase, were eliminated because the scientists determined the probes wouldn’t be able to deploy instruments on the poor road networks of lightly populated, lumpy-terrain plains.
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