Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Three UMass electrical engineers are going hunting for tornadoes

A University of Massachusetts professor and two graduate students set out for Oklahoma Wednesday to chase tornados.

Stephen Frasier and graduate students Krzysztof Orzel and Vijay Venkatesh from the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory will spend the next few months in Tornado Alley as part of the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 ‘- also known as VORTEX 2.

‘What we do here is we build radars in order to trace severe storms and tornadoes,’ Orzel said, ‘so it will get easier to predict them.’

While meteorologists can predict tornadoes, the number of false alarms amounts to 85 percent of all warnings. If there are too many false alarms people stop taking the warnings seriously, Orzel added.

Tornadoes occur everywhere in the United States, but Frasier and his team head for Tornado Alley because storms occur there most frequently. They will be working with people and radars from other institutions and combining the data for more accuracy.

‘The input gets used in what we call a data assimilation experiment,’ Frasier said. ‘Here they take the measurements someone has made and ingest them into a model that’s running. Hopefully that either improves the prediction or predicts what we see later.’

The reasearchers also want to look at what is going on inside tornadoes.

‘During tornadoes there’s rain, there’s hail, there’s cows ‘- there’s debris. The radar is able to discriminate between those different types of things,’ said Frasier. ‘Two polarizations, like polarized sunglasses but with microwaves, and one polarization looks a little different from the other and you can use that to tell you something about the particles.’

While Orzel is a newcomer to storm chasing, this will be Venkatesh’s second time chasing after a storm.

‘It’s exciting,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot of hard work. I mean it’s great actually ‘- I haven’t had a chance to see something half as spectacular as this in my life, so to me it’s extremely rewarding.’

‘We start the day off typically around noon after an hour’s preparation. Once we get started it’s a little too intense to stop,’ according to Venkatesh.

The team spends hours driving to a promising spot and then more hours waiting, said Venkatesh. Most storms happen late in the evening or at night, and the team has ten minutes to take measurements.

‘We have tornadoes out of small storms and we have tornadoes out of severe storms,’ Orzel said. ‘We have tornadoes which are huge and we have tornadoes which are very, very small. Some last for several minutes and some last for twenty seconds.’

Matt Robare can be reached at [email protected]

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