Research and Class Projects

What is TORUS?

And here it is: the field campaign that is the closest to Twister as one can get, but with a few more safety protocols: Targeted Observations by Radars and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). This campaign first took place in May-June of 2019 traveling anywhere in the Plains that indicated supercell formation, and it's happening for one more year in 2022. In short, the purpose is to understand why some supercells produce tornadoes and other don't, which would certainly be helpful in several areas.

I'm super hyped to have the chance of being on this campaign, though it's schedule-permitting. So you can bet I'm doing everything in my power to make sure my schedule permits it! I've heard many stories from friends who were on the 2019 campaign, and it sounds like an incredible experience even if severe weather isn't as active as then. Honestly, being apart of all this fieldwork is really amazing - I learned from BLISSFUL that it's different to apply data you collected yourself to your work. It's like you were part of the whole story. That's why I'm so happy I get to base my Ph.D. work purely on the AWAKEN and BLISSFUL campaigns where I play a role in collected measurements. While I won't be working directly with TORUS data, those who do have already gotten some neat findings from 2019, so I wanna be able to say I was apart of that this time around. Plus...I wouldn't mind seeing a tornado or two granted they don't cause destruction. As always, I will update as it comes closer ^-^

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Hey hey! It's your best friend Arianna a few months after the above section was written. So much has happened during this time, and I indeed got to be apart of the famous TORUS campaign. I suppose I'll just give a quick synpopsis of how things worked, and then show pictures of each day. Like Mario says: here we go!

The official dates for TORUS ran from May 15th - June 18th 2022, where each day everyone would meet in the morning for weather briefings and decide where and when to target supercells. If there was no exciting weather that day, or if storms looked to be too disorganized or too far from our location, we would have a 'down' day. This consisted of either relaxing at the hotel, traveling where we could be in position for the next day's storms, or even heading back home if we were close enough to Norman. Decisions were pretty much made on a day-by-day basis; after all, the weather can evolve over just a few hours, right? If we ended up chasing that day, we usually have the briefing at 9am or 10am, check out of our hotel if we weren't staying in the same area, then hit the rode and usually didn't finish getting data until after dark. The lead institution for the project was University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and us OU students and NSSL/CIRWO researchers collaborated with them, along with Texas Tech University and University of Colorado, Boulder. However, *I believe* it was only OU that split the campaign into shifts based on availability. Shift 1 was tentatively May 15th-31st while Shift 2 was June 1st-18th, and I was on Shift 2. Some people from OU still stayed on the whole time, and I gotta give them props because as much as I LOVED being apart of this and would do it again without a shred of hesistation, just the two weeks I was on wore me out! My colleagues and I would trade driving often, but it's crazy how tiring even just riding in a car for several hours each day can be lol. But, as you'll see in a bit, it was oh so worth it.

Now for my role: I didn't expect this because it wasn't originally planned this way, but I rode in 3 different vehicles during the course of my shift! This was actually really cool for me because I got to see the campaign from multiple perspectives. If you check out the link about the project in the first section, it'll tell you about all the different vehicles in the armada, but the ones I drove among were these bad boys (the LIDAR truck pic is mine but I borrowed the rest from the NSSL):

Mobile LIDAR Truck Mobile Mesonet NOXP Mobile Radar

- The LIDAR in the first picture collects wind speed and direction profiles the boundary layer - functions the same as the LIDAR in CLAMPS from PERiLS, but deploying with the truck is much quicker than a trailer.

- Mobile Mesonet instruments take surface observations of temperature, pressure, dew-point, and more. Transects were taken next to the storm to collect this data.

- The NOXP radar is pictured above, but I was in what was called NOXP Scout. The scout vehicle itself is just a regular van without special instrument, but the people in it have the important job of scouting a proper location to deploy the NOXP Mobile Radar pictured on the right. This is necessary because it can only go up to a certain speed and is really bulky, so finding a good pull-off void of hills and other obstacles significant helps speed up their deployment process.

So, that's the gist of it! It was such an incredible opportunity it was to be apart of this project. It's not directly related to my Ph.D research, but my advisors helped me spin it so it could be (lots of these storms happened near wind farms...*wink wink, nudge nudge*). It also taught me that fieldwork is hard and can be particularly physically and mentally straining in ways I didn't expect, particularly when it's over long stretches. Even my starry-eyed self felt it if things sometimes didn't go as planned. But it was the adventure of a lifetime. I met so many amazing people, and got to better know others I was only acquainted with, I traveled to states I've never been in, my friends and I conjured up many inside jokes that never fail to make me laugh, and we were getting paid to storm chase! It really doesn't get much better than that. I will always be grateful for this experience, along with that of PERiLS and, soon to come, AWAKEN. But, without further ado, here's my TORUS experience!
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May 31, 2022: Near Arkansas City