Scientists set to chase twisters

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Weather researchers next month will begin a five-week project spanning seven states during which they will try to explore the origins, structure and evolution of tornadoes in the central U.S.

The Vortex2 project, to be based at the National Weather Center in Norman, is being billed as the largest and most ambitious attempt ever to study tornadoes and will involve more than 50 scientists and 40 research vehicles that include mobile radars.

The $11.9 million project, to run from May 10 through June 13, is being funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, 10 universities and three nonprofit organizations.

Researchers hope the project -- with the formal name of Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 -- will help them understand how tornadoes form and how large-scale thunderstorms are related to tornadoes, said Louis Wicker, a research meteorologist with the NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman.

"We have a strong focus on trying to figure out why storms tornado when they do," Wicker told The Associated Press, noting the ultimate goal is to increase warning times.

So far this year, nine people have died in tornadoes in the U.S., eight of those after a twister smashed into Lone Grove in southern Oklahoma on Feb. 10. Nine days later, another tornado killed one person in Hickory Grove, Ga.

Tornadoes tend to develop in the supercell thunderstorms that often form over more than 900 miles of the central Great Plains. The study will focus on southern South Dakota, western Iowa, eastern Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma.

The original Vortex program operated in the central Great Plains during 1994 and 1995 and documented the entire life cycle of a tornado for the first time.

"An important finding from the original ... experiment was that the factors responsible for causing tornadoes happen on smaller time and space scales than scientists had thought," said Stephan Nelson, the National Science Foundation's program director for physical and dynamic meteorology.

Wicker said that program's findings have helped improve the National Weather Service's severe weather warning statistics, because it caused the organization's meteorologists to more closely examine radar before issuing weather warnings.

"You're trying to increase your probability of detection and decrease the false-alarm ratio," Wicker said. "Those two statistics play against each other. "...We can do a better job. We saw a bump in warning skill after Vortex1, which appears to be related to knowledge that got disseminated."

Wicker said the Vortex2 project not only will almost double the number of researchers and vehicles used in the original project, but will also use technology that was not as well developed in the mid-1990s, such as cell phone towers and the Internet.

He also said while the project will be based in Norman, that researchers might not spend much time there.

"We will be fully mobile," he said. "We're starting in Norman but we're not sitting in Norman. If we need to go to Dodge City on May 10 to set up for May 11, we will, and if we have to go to Nebraska the next day, we will. "We feel to best maximize the resources ... the best thing for us to do is not stay Norman-centric but to roam the central Plains."

In addition to NOAA and NSF, institutions taking part in the new study include the Center for Severe Weather Research, Penn State University, the University of Oklahoma, Texas Tech University, Lyndon State College in Vermont, the University of Colorado, Purdue University, North Carolina State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Nebraska, Environment Canada and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Preliminary results from the project will be presented at Penn State this fall. A second phase of the project is scheduled to be conducted from May 1 to June 15 of next year.