Discovery Channel: Storm Chasers

Wow! TIV is getting some action!

4 hours a sleep and wearing my less dirty pair of cargos, I wanted to share a still of my footage from yesterday! We were right in there and got some GREAT stuff.

This season is really giving us some good action and we expect it to only get better (I'm not a meteorologist so that doesn't count as a forcast).

Thanks for checking in and I'll keep posting.

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TIV Producers prepare for the new season of Storm Chasers

Hey everyone, lots of action going on. We are out here in Midland, TX watching the models. Here's a video from a week ago. It's an inside look behind the scenes at the people who make the show out in the field. I have a couple more videos with our medic, Marc, and Ronan's birthday dinner in queue. I'll write up a blog when we get a break, there a lot of weather going on!


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First good tornado of the year for TornadoVideos.net!

Check out this video from our intercept of two tornadoes in Northwest Oklahoma.  We were closer to the first tornado than we have ever been, with trees getting ripped out of the ground less than 100 feet away!  Our new armored vehicle was very well protected against the flying debris, and allowed us to collect very important wind data from the tornado as it crossed the road right in front of the hood.  We're now heading to Southwest Texas for a nice High Plains setup!

Our first chase day!

Big day today! Sunday looks to (potentially) be "the day" out of the next set of weather, but today looks plenty good. Why not grab a few tornadoes on our warmup run? Crossing our fingers, today should be a lot of fun.

Stay tuned to the LiveTracker and watch the excitement!
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/storm-chasers/live-tracker/live-tracker.html

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A little video from the adopted TIV garage

Utility Equipment Repair of Amarillo, TX has been gracious enough to lend us their garage to upgrade our TIV until this ridge wears out next week. Enjoy this video of the hard working TIV crew (I'm not in it because I am behind the camera). I will be doing videos for the blog with a Flip camera for the blog, hope you enjoy them!

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TornadoVideos.net captures first funnel yesterday!

TVN documented this funnel from start to finish just southwest of Miami, OK at around 6:30 pm CDT.  This storm was a classic mini-supercell, but had textbook structure and very strong rotation.  While this was a reported tornado on the Storm Prediction Center, we could not confirm a ground circulation, although if this funnel moved over a dry freshly plowed field, there would have been a massive dust tube all the way up to the cloud base.  A good start to a long season!

Here are pictures of the TVN Dominator's new color, and of the production crew prepping the vehicle with the tape decks and ice cube cameras.  How does everyone like the darker new color compared to the bright red?

Moderate Risk Today! TVN Mobilizing!

A moderate risk has been issued today (Thursday) for parts of Northeast Oklahoma and Southeast KS, for the risk of strong tornadoes and massive hail.  The TornadoVideos.net team has been working 20 hour days this week to make sure all our equipment is in order, and we don't miss the first big tornado outbreak of the season.  We'll be heading out in a few minutes for our target area of Northeast Oklahoma, so be sure to check out live streaming video from the storm chasing teams at the TVN Live Tracker Page .  Check back for updates as this dangerous situation unfolds. 

TornadoVideos.net Dominator ready to go!

It's been a long time since my last update, so I thought I'd get back to posting on the blog since it's the morning of the first significant tornado outbreak of the year!  During the winter, we've been working on several new tornado research projects, including the construction of the ultimate extreme tornado research vehicle - the TVN Dominator!  The goal of this vehicle is to more efficiently deploy our tornado probe in the path of tornadoes with our new probe deployment tray (see pictures of the rear below), and to get extremely close to tornadoes and scan vertical wind velocities with our single beam radar (which will be mounted in the roof bracket in a week or so).  Direct measurement of these vertical winds  has never been done before, and we hope collection of this data will increase substantially our understanding of tornadoes, and the damage tornadic winds can cause.  Further increasing our safety in strong tornadic winds is the state-of-the-art hydraulic system of the Dominator, allowing us to drop the entire frame to the ground when we deploy.  The black rubber sheath around the base will prevent wind from getting under the vehicle and causing a potential roll, but in that event we also have an external roll cage and NASCAR style safety harnesses!  As you will see on the show and in future blog updates, the color of the Dominator has been changed from the above bright red, to a much darker blood red as we don't want anyone to get alarmed when they see us blasting down the road!
                                 
       The goal is not to drive into a tornado, but just to get extremely close to the funnel to measure the vertical wind velocities around the tornado.  The armor around the Tahoe is to protect us from flying debris, and of course we'll never have to worry about hail again!  Considering all the wind shields we lose during the season this thing should pay for itself by the end of 2010!  The goal with this vehicle was to not only increase our safety when getting close to tornadoes, but also to INCREASE our mobility in the field and on muddy farm roads.  We drove it all around today and it rides like a Cadillac, and has even better visibility with slightly bigger windows.  Here is video of the vehicle in action:

Here we go again!

Here we go again!
Another season of storm chasing is upon us and before we get started, here’s a little look back. First, let’s revisit these clips from the most recent episodes of “Storm Chasers”.
Unfortunately, Discovery doesn’t let us embed its youtube videos, but just click on the links and come back.
“TIV Hits the Bullseye!”-A little misleading, watch this and see how heartbreakingly close we came last year. That only means we will try harder this time around.

Vehicle Tour Bloopers - A fun video worth watching is the outtakes of our vehicle tours. We are clearly not trained actors, only trained storm chasers.

Sean has been working diligently on TIV2. I’ve been helping out in my spare time and Ronan even flew out to LA. We are giving it another go this year with TIV2 and it looks to be a beast this year. With all that went wrong with it last year, it was almost even scarier taking all of those parts out and discovering future breakdowns waiting to happen. Be rest assured though, this vehicle has been road tested already and it’s still waiting on the finishing touches. We even have real tank seats. I’ll post picture of the beast in my next blog.

In the meantime, what have we been up to? Ronan’s only comment was, “overseas working on a secret job.” As for me, there’s a couple of articles I was interviewed for, check them out!
Article
Q&A

I also was interviewed/shot by a website called “Indie Cribs” and that’ll be out in a month or so.

And as I said, Sean’s been really busy with the renovations to TIV2 and being a father to his two beautiful daughters.

Come on back soon, we are heading out to Colorado to prepare for the weather very soon. I will have a look at the TIV2 improvements next time!

Look for the Storm Chasers group on Facebook!

Get Some!
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