Explorations
A Storm is Born
Chasing Tornadoes with the International H2O Project
Summertime in Tornado AlleyPhoto from NOAA
June 2002
It's summertime in Tornado Alley and the weather weenies are out in force. From all over the world they've converged on the Southern Great Plains for a first-hand look at some severe storms—the ones that produce lightning, hail, enough rainfall to cause flash floods, and, of course, tornados. Many of these people are amateurs, hoping to spot twisters for the sheer thrill of it. But the several dozen researchers associated with the International H2O Project (IHOP)—touted as the largest field experiment in atmospheric science ever conducted in North America—are here for a different purpose. They want to understand the nitty gritty of how storms form, the phenomena that occur on a scale too small to be detected by fixed weather stations. With an armada of cars, trucks, and planes at their command, each vehicle fixed with instruments to measure temperature, pressure, wind speed, and moisture, these researchers hope to take snapshots of the atmosphere while storms are brewing. They'd like to figure out why an atmosphere that looks ripe for a thunderstorm sometimes won't produce one. And why small storms that shouldn't produce tornados sometimes do. Ultimately, the data they collect will help them figure out how to forecast severe storms more accurately.
Join writer Dana Bauer, traveling with Penn State meteorologists Paul Markowski and Yvette Richardson and the rest of the IHOP team as they follow the trail of storms across Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas.
Funding for IHOP 2002 is provided by the following agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), University of Hohenheim (Germany), National Weather Service (NWS), Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMB+F, Germany) and the Deutsche Forshungsgemeinshaft (DFG, Germany), CNRS Service d'Aéronomie (France) and Canadian Foundation for Climate and atmospheric Sciences (CRCAS, Canada), For additional information, please contact Dave Parsons (parsons@ucar.edu ; 303-497-8749) or Tammy Weckwerth (tammy@ucar.edu ; 303-497-8790) or go to the IHOP 2002 web site.