TWISTEX

[1] The project normally ran from mid-April through the end of June with a domain that covers the Great Plains and portions of the Midwestern United States.

[5] Several other storm chasers, including The Weather Channel's Mike Bettes, were also caught in the same sub-vortex but escaped with only minor injuries.

Killed by the record breaking EF3 tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma: Several hardened instruments will be deployed in paths of tornadoes to collect the following datasets: atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and visualization for accurate debris/hydrometeor velocities and for verification of the tornado-relative location of the in situ sampling.

Collectively the two camera probes will be used for photogrammetry purposes to visualize/measure tornado-driven debris and hydrometeors as well as for determining the tornado-relative location of the HITPRs.

This technique will provide excellent time resolution for velocity determination of low-level tornado core winds and lofted debris.

While there are abundant kinematic datasets gathered by mobile radar of the tornadic region of supercells, the number of quality mobile mesonet or sticknet thermodynamic datasets of the flow field proximate to the tornadic region, generally within the supercell rear-flank downdraft (RFD) outflow, are comparatively rare.

Each of the participating TWISTEX vehicles will have a mobile mesonet (MM) station mounted on the roof including the probe deployment truck.

When coupled with the in-situ probe array data which represents another effective mesonet station, it is hoped to obtain thermodynamic and kinematic mapping that will describe characteristics of the flow reaching the tornado.