On the Road Again (well, sort of...)

Greetings people and web spiders! In case you hadn't already heard, Vortex2 had its first deployment yesterday! (It's after midnight, so technically it was the day before yesterday.) The only moderately "exciting" part of the Vortex2 domain yesterday was in Kansas, so we loitered around our hotel parking lot for several hours before deciding to deploy to an area in northwestern Kansas that forecasters thought might experience some storms. And it did experience storms! Little ones. We saw a bit of rain and some pea to dime sized hail while we deployed our 16 120 pound pods roadside in a somewhat orderly fashion and drove away, but it was relatively dry when we drove back a few short minutes later to collect the pods and determine we were hungry and in need of dinner.

It was short and sweet.

Since there was no real expectation of a tornado during operating hours yesterday, this first deployment was deemed a practice. Overall, it appears to have gone relatively well (except that a couple probe vehicles and a media vehicle from one of the teams got stuck in the mud). CSWR still has a few kinks that it needs to work out, but that's what this weekend's for! Right? (For the record, there was a tornado reported near the area we deployed yesterday, but it occurred after operations had ceased. Post deployment, a severe storm chased us back to our hotels, and blasted our vehicles with high winds, dust, and debris while they were sitting in the parking lot.)

Sadly, I have no photos from our operations yesterday (I was deploying pods out of Probe 13 instead of taking pictures), but I do have some pretty cool shots from the wind farm that DOW7, DOW5, and a couple probe vehicles visited today on the way to our brand spankin' new "conditions are not conducive to storm development, but we need somewhere to sleep" location!




They look so tiny by comparison... Ever wonder what would happen if you started scanning with a DOW that close to a wind turbine? I can tell you that it would probably be something that would not make Josh Wurman (or the DOW) very happy.

I see DOW people.