Sunday, May 23, 2010

Back to the south

So storm chasing involves a lot of driving. This can be seen since we are heading back to the kansas/nebraska border to chase storms today. Vortex 2 did not go out yesterday because the conditions were too conditional for the long drive. We are definitely glad we made the drive. It was well worth it to see the storms we did with barely anyone around. We saw a few chasers, but nothing too bad. Today we will be back into an area of possible chaser convergence. Hopefully we will not have too much issue there.

Also, to clarify, I know the weather channel has been doing a lot of coverage on chasers getting away of vortex2. We are not one of those "storm crashers." Indeed there are a lot of amateur chasers who do not know what they are doing and get in the way of other chasers who do know what they are doing, but that is not us. We are always careful to be off on side roads or parking lots where we do not risk injury to ourselves or anyone else.

We have seen cars passing in a double yellow, tripods set up on the side of the road, and people running across the road. We realize these mistakes and always chase responsibly. Vortex2 has never had an issue with us. They are collecting valuable data for the meteorological community, and we understand that.

Anyway, today's set up. Today will be late initiation along the retreating warm front/dry line. There is unstable air to the southeast of this boundary interaction and very stable air to the north. Our goal is to once again chase the triple point (where warm front meets the dry line). We are 2 for 2 on seeing tornadoes when we chase the triple point. Hopefully today we can make it 3 for 3.
South of the triple point we should see CAPE approaching 3000 J/kg and 0-3 helicity over 250 m^2/s^2. This should be more than sufficient for supercells if we can get the cap to break along the triple point. We are still in northern Nebraska, so we have a lot of driving to do.
Hopefully we see something good this afternoon.

No comments:

Post a Comment