Midwest’s ‘Tornado Alley’ Now Under Special Radar

As part of an ambitious attempt to figure out how tornadoes form and how to predict them more accurately, engineers from the University of Massachusetts are deploying two special mobile Doppler radar systems to the Great Plains.

The national project, known as Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2, or VORTEX2, will enlist more than 50 scientists and 10 mobile radars to sample the wind, temperature and moisture environments in tornado-spawning storms in greater detail than before. One of the UMass units brings the highest spatial resolution of any mobile Doppler radar in the nation to address the study goals.

From early May to mid-June when severe storms are most common, the $11.9 million project will look at events that have long been hidden behind rain and hail within supercell thunderstorms. With other specialists converging on one of the nation’s “tornado alleys,” the UMass group will use truck-mounted Doppler radars to “see” inside the violent storms at ground level, offering one of the most precise radars ever used for tornado de-tection, far more precise than those mounted on high towers or on satellites.

Electrical and computer engineering professor Stephen Frasier, director of the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL), said that with any luck, they’ll capture data from a handful of actual tornadoes as they form, to help meteorologists understand tornado origin, structure and evolution.

Results from the first VORTEX study in 1994-1995 allowed scientists to document the entire life-cycle of a tornado for the first time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). An important finding from that original experiment, according to an NSF program director, is that the factors responsible for causing tornadoes happen on smaller time and space scales than scientists had thought.