VORTEX-Southeast is a groundbreaking project to study severe storms in the Southeast and why some produce tornadoes and some don't. It is underway now, with the ultimate goal to provide you and your family with more time to prepare before tornadic storms move in.
"We want to improve the lead time on warnings to give people time to take shelter. We also want to improve the accuracy and decrease the false alarm rate of tornado warnings," said project scientist Dr. Christopher Weiss of Texas Tech University.
Over the last 20 years, two VORTEX field projects have studied tornadoes on the Great Plains.
"The tornado problem is like an onion basically. You peel back a layer, you know, you solve one problem peeling back a layer but there's more layers underneath," said Dr. Robin Tanamachi of Purdue University.
Now through April 30, scientists will peel back more layers, learning exactly what makes severe storms in the southeast tick.
While we've learned a lot about the hows and whys of tornadoes over the last two decades, the Southeast presents specific research questions.
"Nighttime tornadoes, which are fairly common in the Southeast, don't happen on the Plains. We don't go out to study them, because they just don't happen," project manager Dr. Erik Rasmussen said, adding that nighttime severe weather will be studied in this new project.
According to Tanamachi, "We have much more complex terrain in the Southeast, we have a lot of vegetation." All of this goes into determining what storms are tornadic and what storms are not.
More than 100 scientists will operate a mobile armada of instruments to measure every aspect of a storm environment, especially close to the ground. For example, one vital piece of equipment during the project will be what's known as a mobile sticknet, essentially eight mobile weather stations that will measure temperature, moisture, pressure and wind ahead of a storm.
"A lot of tornadogenesis theories out there have a lot to do with, for example, how temperature varies around developing tornadoes," Weiss said.
The goal of VORTEX-Southeast is to improve both the timeliness and accuracy of tornado warnings. Today, the average tornado warning lead time is about 13 minutes. There's a day in the not-so-distant future, though, that that lead time could be upwards of a half hour.
Ultimately, better data will get into the forecast models that Severe Weather Team 2 uses every day to forecast the weather.
"Once we have a good grasp on that, we can use that knowledge to improve our numerical weather prediction models and in particular our high resolution numerical weather prediction models," said Tanamachi.
WSBTV
