This spring, we are taking a breather from the style of experiments we conducted in 2016 and 2017. This is intended to give researchers some time to study data we have already collected, and to use new insights to improve our scientific questions and use of resources in future years.

However, the NOAA P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft will be used in VORTEX-SE this spring. This aircraft has a Doppler radar with a pair of antennas in the tail so that we can do analysis of the precipitation and winds in Southeast storms. One antenna looks slightly forward of the aircraft and the other slightly rearward. As the plane flies by a storm, along-beam velocities measured in these two separate “look angles” can be combined to give us the complete velocity at millions of points.

We have a huge challenge in VORTEX-SE owing to the terrain and vegetation to produce the kinds of mobile radar analyses that have been obtained comparatively routinely in the Great Plains. Until we can tackle this problem, we will not be able to do the sorts of detailed storm studies that can tell us how a particular tornado formed, and how the parent storm might have behaved differently than the fairly well-understood Great Plains cousins. So in addition to the NOAA P-3, we will be deploying three-radar networks consisting of University of Oklahoma SMART-Radars (dual-polarization mobile C-band radars) and either the U. Alabama-Huntsville C-band dual-polarization Doppler radar at Huntsville (known as ARMOR), or the U. Louisiana-Monroe S-band dual-polarization Doppler radar at Monroe. We want to know if such deployments of combined surface/airborne Doppler radars can be used to produce higher quality storm airflow analyses than other combinations of radars, and whether/not we can do a better job piecing together the airflow patterns in the crucial near-ground layer that is so important to tornado formation and longevity. Then, using this assessment, we can more effectively plan future observations to address VORTEX-SE science questions.