Chaser Ryan McGinnis wrote an excellent blog post about Vortex 2’s rough day last Monday. It is a great story about a frustrating day for the team. It also has some outstanding photographs.
Find it at https://bigstormpicture.blogspot.com/2010/05/vortex-2-may-10-2010.html.
Ryan writes…
I hesitate to editorialize here as it seems to have a negative effect on the discussion about Vortex 2 in the chase community, so I will tread lightly. However, some personal observations (that reflect my opinion and my opinion only):
The Vortex 2 communications system is not robust enough. It’s very well put together, but relies too heavily on the cellular network, which in rural areas is quickly overloaded. The radio repeaters are an excellent backup and work most of the time, though I’ve noticed from radio traffic that it sometimes takes those in the lead in the field a long time to realize that their SASSI communications are no longer coming in, and thus don’t know to use the radio to get new updates. It might be useful for users to announce over the radio that they have posted to SASSI when they do; this could even be automated as a noise or chime that is broadcast on the appropriate control frequencies after each post. It’s too late in the year to integrate something like this, though. It also would have been useful for each of the field commanders and group leaders to have access to Iridium satellite phones, which work anywhere, anytime, as a last resort. You can even purchase external antennas for them so that people wouldn’t have to exit their vehicles to use them. When cellular doesn’t work, these will, under any conditions. They’re terribly expensive, but when you’ve sunk $11,000,000 into getting as much data on tornadoes as possible, it’s a bit hard to swallow that the team misses a good chance at acquiring data because they have no way of communicating with one another.
Whether it was communications or planning, the net result of May 10 was that the Vortex 2 radar grid was deployed about 30 miles too far north and that it didn’t shift south in time to get good data on the obvious storm of the day. I am not in a position to judge or even speculate whether redeployment was possible, but much of the radio chatter that I heard suggested many felt that it was. Effectively, those units that dropped south despite orders (either because of communications failures or “communications failures”) were in position to intercept a tornado; those that didn’t, weren’t. There were other difficulties as well; for example, the Doppler on Wheels 7 hard drives were not properly cleared off in the morning, meaning that at some point they ran out of space and stopped recording radar data. Vortex 2 apparently got dual Doppler radar coverage for around 30 minutes on the Seminole tornado, which is a good saving grace, but overall, few of the Vortex 2 goals were met; they did not have a large number of integrated radar units on the storm, and while they did have a number of Texas Tech StickNet mesonet instruments in the vicinity of the tornado, they did not deploy the tornado pods. I suspect that this day’s intercept will be seen as a partial failure with a few caveat successes, and that the Vortex 2 leaders will use this day as an instructive tool to help improve in the future. That said, while the general mood of most Vortex 2 members was one of extreme disappointment, it must be remembered that on a scale of 1 to 10, this day had a difficulty level of “11”. Fast storm motions made positioning 50+ units over 900 square mile area difficult; intercepting a storm was as much about luck as about skill.
There is now exactly a month left for Vortex 2 to collect data — which can be an eternity during Spring on the plains.
