Severe Weather Outbreak To Draw A Big Crowd, Including Scientific Researchers

A severe thunderstorm looms over Indiana on Thursday. Teams of
scientists will be on the Plains over the next month studying
severe storms and tornadoes. Photo via
Twitter by Kyle Lockhart, @eas3964

There have been pushes over the years to really study severe weather and tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and South, resulting in forecasts and warnings that are much better and more timely than they used to be.

Those better forecasts have helped lead to days of anticipation this week that a severe weather outbreak in the Plains would begin in earnest today and last for several days. That is turning out to be the case. 

Which gives scientists a chance to poke and prod these storms even more, in the hopes of improving forecasts even more.

As the Category 6 blog notes, the largest experiment in years to study supercells and tornadoes kicks off this week, coinciding with the start of this severe weather outbreak. The study was long planned. The timing of the severe weather this weekend was just a lucky break.

Says Category 6:

"The TORUS project (Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells) is drawing on a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation plus about $1.5 million from NOAA."

One area of focus is rotating thunderstorms, which sometimes produce tornadoes. Here's the problem:  There's often thunderstorms with enough rotation to prompt tornado warnings, but most of these rotating storms ultimately don't produce tornadoes.  Up to 70 percent of tornado warnings are false alarms, which means there's a real risk people will ignore tornado warnings since there "always" is no tornado.

Scientists want to better understand which rotating storms are not much to worry about and which ones will produce tornadoes. That would reduce the number of "false alarms."

Unlike past big tornado studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, there is a new tool this time: Drones.

Drones will take video, like that famous one of a drone's eye view of an Oklahoma tornado earlier this year. But the main purpose of the drones, says Category 6,  is to take data just above ground level, to an elevation of up to 2,500 feet. That will help the scientists better understand just what is happening in the clouds of storms that produce tornadoes, and those that don't.

A hurricane hunter will also be deployed to check out the Plains storms. It's not hurricane season, so the plane is available.

This all sounds like an update of the movie "Twister," and I'm sure the graduate students in this study have a bit of a giddy feeling that they're advancing science while at the same time being awestruck by the sight of Plains supercells.

There will also be hordes of other storm chasers out there over the next few days. Let's hope they stay safe, and don't take too many reckless chances in the name of getting spectacular too-close tornado videos.

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