Penn Staters take off in search of twisters

$10 million study largest of its kind

By Anne Danahy

Paul Markowski had a good reason for not having time to talk one day last week: "We're storm chasing today."

Photo provided

Researchers traveled in “mobile mesonets,” vans equipped with instruments to collect information on weather conditions around the tornadoes.

View larger

That chase led Markowski, associate professor in Penn State’s department of meteorology, and a team of 100 researchers through nine Midwestern states in a quest to understand tornadoes.

“The ultimate goal is to be able to improve warnings for tornadoes. You have to have a better understanding of why some storms make tornadoes and some don’t,” Markowski said Friday afternoon from Perrytown, Texas, where he was observing cumulus clouds.

Their work, known as Vortex2, is the largest study of its kind. It received about $10 million in funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation and will continue for a second year in 2010. Markowski said he and Penn State assistant professor Yvette Richardson began work on the project in 2003 and it grew to a steering committee of eight scientists. The last similar study to take place was the Vortex1 in the mid-1990s.

Markowski said he’s been interested in the weather since a tornado outbreak hit Pennsylvania in 1985, when he was in fifth grade.

“When the summer came after that, I started reading about tornadoes at the library,” he said.

“One book led to another. Now I’m among the lucky few who make a living figuring out how tornadoes work.”

The researchers spent five weeks tracking weather patterns, including super cell thunderstorms, which are storms that didn’t quite turn into tornadoes.

Markowski and Richardson led a team of seven Penn State students with a van — known as a “mobile mesonet” — equipped with instruments to collect information on temperatures, wind and pressure around the tornado.

Markowski said that understanding tornadoes and why some storms produce them requires extensive observation of different parts of the storm. With this project, the researchers were split into teams, each with the equipment, including radars, weather balloons and other instruments, to collect different types of information. Markowski said that means getting information on the large-scale storm as well as the tornado itself.

It also means driving all over the place and changing direction with the weather. Thursday night they were in Lamar, Colo., before heading to Wichita Falls, Texas, on Friday morning. Markowski said after driving about 200 miles, they switched their target to the northeastern Texas panhandle.

While this spring wasn’t a busy one for tornadoes, Markowski and Richardson said they were able to collect information on storms that rotate but don’t become tornadoes.

The mobile mesonets were on hand for a tornado in LaGrange, Wyo.

“Comparisons between the tornadic and non-tornadic storms is crucial to furthering our understanding. The data set collected in the tornadic storm is the most complete data set ever obtained in a tornadic storm and was a tremendous accomplishment by all of the participants,” Richardson said in an e-mail.

While the on-site work is finished for the summer, the researchers from Penn State and the other universities will be sorting through their data with plans to publish their findings eventually.

“The most significant moment for me was seeing the tornado form in a field in Wyoming, knowing that our vehicles were all in the right places when it happened and that we were obtaining great data on a storm that was not hurting anyone,” Richardson said. “It was followed shortly after by about 20 minutes of baseball-size hail that was also memorable.”

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.