Introduction from the TVN team

Hello! I'm Reed Timmer, and I'd like to introduce the TVN team as a new edition to Storm Chasers this year.  We are honored to be a part of this incredible production, and hope to bring you some jaw-dropping tornado footage from the 2008 season.  Different from the DOW and TIV team, we storm chase year-round from Mexico to Canada...In fact, TODAY will be our third storm chase of the year, and the chances for tornadoes look to be high in North Texas later this afternoon.  Before I describe our storm chasing team and what we do, I'd like to discuss the tornado potential for today's chase...

A moderate risk has been issued by the Storm Prediction Center for this afternoon (Thursday, April 3) for parts of N Texas and S Oklahoma into western Arkansas, for the potential of a severe weather outbreak including the possibility of tornadoes.  A strong upper storm system will be ejecting from the Rocky Mountain Region today, with a warm, humid, and unstable airmass in place across the Southern Plains.  As a cold front slides southward this afternoon, thunderstorms will erupt in the moderate risk area, and could easily produce tornadoes given ample wind shear (changing wind with height).  The TVN team will be targeting Wichita Falls, Texas, which is near the northwest corner of the moderate risk area above.   Our plan is to leave Norman, OK (our home base) in the next few hours, and hopefully to intercept developing supercells by late-afternoon.

You can track our position on the live GPS tracker
which will show our position in real-time updated every few seconds, with radar overlay so you can see our location relative to the storm we're chasing.  Once the DOW and TIV team are active in a few weeks, all Storm Chasers vehicles (DOW, TIV, Scouts, TVN) will be displayed on the tracker.  Today, since only TVN will be chasing, you'll only be able to see our team on the tracker.  The live tracker will be an amazing new feature to the website this year, as you'll be able to track the DOW, TIV, and Scouts as they deploy near tornadoes, updated every few seconds!!

Now, to introduce our team and what we do.  The TVN (TornadoVideos.net) team is comprised of three storm chasers:  Joel Taylor, Chris Chittick, and I.  We have been storm chasing from Mexico to Canada for the last decade, driving nearly 100,000 miles every season.  As a team, we've intercepted over 300 tornadoes, including over 30 during the 2007 season.  Separate from the DOW/TIV team, our goal is to get as close as possible to violent tornadoes and document their small-scale features on high-definition video, as well as collect massive hail stones with our portable freezer (and then Fedex the stones to an Aircraft company).  During the recent "off-season", we designed a very heavy (300 pounds), low-profile camera probe to place in the paths of tornadoes. 
Pictured at right, a Lexan bubble houses the HD camera, above a 300 pound block of steel-re-enforced concrete (which we mixed in our kitchen!).  Lexan is a highly durable polycarbonate thermoplastic, which is supposed to be near "bullet-proof", and should protect the camera against projectiles traveling at nearly 200 mph.  Once positioned in the path of an oncoming tornado, Chris and I deploy the 300 lb probe, return to our chase vehicle (pictured below) and Joel will drive us to safety.  If we had an operational probe last year, we easily could have had a dozen successful deployments...which is the motivation for the probe of this season.  If successful, this camera probe would be the first ever to capture HDV-quality video of a direct tornado strike.  The goal in using an HDV camcorder is to capture on video the fine-scale structure within the vortices of a tornado.  On May 4 of last year, we intercepted a photogenic yet powerful tornado in Northwest OK (on the same day as the Greensburg, KS EF5 tornado), and captured video of multiple vortices (or "mini-tornadoes") rotating within the main tornado.  This HDV footage was used by a research scientist at the University of Oklahoma working on the modeling of these "mini-tornadoes", and the simulated versions looked exactly the same as the vortices we photographed!  Frame captures of these mini-tornadoes from the May 4, 2007 tornado are shown below:

Our goal with the TVN camera probe is to capture any smaller-scale features within the "mini-tornadoes" pictured above.  Once we add instruments to the probe, the resulting wind, temperature, and pressure data obtained from within tornadoes would be invaluable.
Shown at left is the TVN storm chasing vehicle, equipped with a mobile weather station, dashboard mounted HDV camcorders, mobile freezer for hail, and radios for communication.  The weather station on the top of the car measures wind speed and direction, temperature, dewpoint, and pressure, and is logged directly on our laptop.  The wind speed measured from our vehicle could get quite high given our usual close proximity to tornadoes!  However, the most important feature on our vehicle is likely the 4-wheel drive...considering we've been stuck in the mud over 50 times in the last 10 years!

I'll be updating this blog on a daily basis when we're storm chasing in the field this year, so please stay tuned as we travel the Plains in search of the most powerful natural force on the planet!

Comments

[Rekx]

Very cool...thanks for the explanation of the forcast for today....I will be following from Dallas.

[Casey]

100,000 miles a year? Wow, if you had 50 chases that'd be averaging 2,000 miles each chase! 100 chases would get that down to 1,000 miles average. That's nuts.

[Alysa]

I'm very excited for you guys to be joining the storm chasers team. It will hopefully add some more successful footage of the intercepted tornadoes. Since Storm Chasers 2007 used your footage frequently anyways! Looking forward to this!

[Alysa]

I'm very excited for you guys to be joining the storm chasers team. It will hopefully add some more successful footage of the intercepted tornadoes. Since Storm Chasers 2007 used your footage frequently anyways! Looking forward to this!

[Verne]

Hey Reed and Joel! Cool to see you guys will be on SC this year. Looking forward to seeing how your HD cam probe works. Hopefully we'll get some negative-tilt troughs with tornadoes in the alley soon instead of all these hailers *sigh*
Best of luck out there!
_V

[Scott]

Man, that looks an aweful lot similar to another probe that I've seen different chase group use.

[Dan Caldwell]

yo Josh hows it going

[James]

does any one know the radio frequincys the DOW's use?

[Keith Mitchell]

hey reed my name is keith from atlanta, i watch the show on tv and i have always been interested in tornadoes and weather all together. i would like to join a team of experts to follow theses things so i can get to learn how to chase team and as well learn more about weather its self. but i would really like to join a team. please respond back

[Keith Mitchell]

hey reed my name is keith from atlanta, i watch the show on tv and i have always been interested in tornadoes and weather all together. i would like to join a team of experts to follow theses things so i can get to learn how to chase team and as well learn more about weather its self. but i would really like to join a team. please respond back