Chasing a tornado with a Doppler on wheels
Storm scientist Karen Kosiba explains how portable Doppler radar can be used to track tornadoes, improving the accuracy of tornado forecasts.
Greenfield, Iowa – In 2024, devastating tornadoes claimed the lives of 40 people across the country, putting meteorologists and storm trackers on the front lines of using advanced technology to advance weather forecasts.
Each year, experts from the University of Illinois, the University of Oklahoma, the College of DuPage and other universities venture into the heartland, sometimes traveling thousands of miles, to encounter these deadly phenomena and deploy specialized sensors.
The adventure may seem similar to the recent “Twister” or the 1996 hit “Twister,” but the movie is very different from real life.
Karen Kosiba, a research scientist at the University of Illinois, uses a mobile radar system called Doppler on Wheels, or DOW, to track tornadoes.
DOW is equipped with advanced radar and portable weather instruments that can instantly scan thunderstorms and provide critical information.
These data provide unique insights into wind speeds near the ground, helping to determine the intensity and environmental impact of tornadoes.
“We were able to get very close to the tornado,” Cosiba told Fox Weather. “We're less than a kilometer away. That means we can measure winds very close to the ground with mobile radar…This helps us really connect what's happening in the radar observations very close to the ground to the actual damage seen on the surface. .
The movie “Twister” will be released in 2024
DOW is much more advanced than the storm chasing depicted in the movies.
In the 1996 movie Twister, a group of storm chasers attempt to deploy a set of sensors made from soda cans into a vortex.
Each “Dorothy” container is equipped with dozens of sensors, designed to deploy and study the internal structure of the tornado, and immediately feed the results back to the computer.
Real-life studies are more complex and often take years to fully understand the data.
“Collecting data is challenging, but the really hard part and the real work comes from analyzing all the data,” Kosiba said. “So, we're not just looking at one tornado, but we're trying to get a general idea of what the winds are like in a tornado, and what the structure of a tornado looks like across a wide range of tornadoes. So it's a very complex project. And it will It took many years and a lot of analysis to get to this result.
Average tornadoes by month. (Forth Weather)
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The EF-4 tornado that struck the small town of Greenfield, Iowa, on May 21 was one of many tornadoes studied by experts. The tornado claimed five lives and was rated the most powerful to affect the county this year.
“So for this latest tornado, it was actually relatively small compared to other tornadoes, but it had very strong wind speeds, over 250 miles per hour, which we measured with the Doppler on Wheels ,” Cosiba said. “We really want to understand how tornadoes form, what the winds are like near the surface, and how tornadoes evolve.”
Researchers typically wrap up their surveys by midsummer, as the jet stream moves further north, causing thunderstorms to break out in the upper Midwest and southern Canada.
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