Probe 13 Had (Has) a (Many) Problem (Problems).

Friday was a big(ish) chase day. It wasn’t necessarily big from the “omg lots of tornadoes!!!1!!111” standpoint, but our friendly neighborhood convection (read: storms) initiated early in the day and dumped a couple of tornadoes and copious amounts of rain on parts of northwest Texas before sunset. This meant that the Vortex2 crew was rushed out of its weather briefing before the noon hour and told to head to some undisclosed location in Texas (it’s undisclosed because I can’t precisely remember where we first went on Friday… Big Springs maybe? When you travel to multiple towns in rapid succession in a single day, their names become a blur).

Since all of this bustling about to escape from the hotel occurred around lunch time, most of CSWR took the liberty of stopping at a truck stop for a “catered lunch” (read: whatever our lovely friend Rachel purchased at Walmart that morning), and subsequently missed the opportunity to capture data on a tornado that had the audacity to form several miles away while the group was noshing on hummus and Oreos (not at the same time, eww). As our other lovely friend, Eric, has said: we were foiled by a turkey sandwich. None of this, however, mattered for Probe 13 because we had bigger problems. Our pods would not work! GASP!

As has been mentioned previously, CSWR operates 16 tornado pods out of its 6 probe vehicles, and each tornado pod holds 2 to 3 high definition video cameras and measures winds, temperature, and relative humidity. Meteorological data is collected once every second and stored on a little data logger that’s nestled in a big ugly yellow box on each pod. The stored data can then be downloaded when operations are done for the day and backed up elsewhere for safe keeping. Unfortunately, these data loggers have a battery, and batteries die. Probe 13 had the oldest pods in the CSWR pod fleet. This week we came to the realization that all of the Probe 13 pod batteries were (GASP!) as good as dead. (I’ll make the rest of the story short, I promise!)

So, while most of the CSWR crew was eating sandwiches with the semis at a truck stop somewhere in northwest Texas, the occupants of Probe 13 were at a local Radio Shack, cleaning the store out of its supply of asininely expensive 3.6 volt 1/2 AA batteries. Yours truly had the fabulous task of removing the ugly yellow box (attached to its pod by silicone-y goodness) and its nestled data logger from 2 of 3 Probe 13 pods, and replacing the inexplicably expensive 1/2 AA batteries. It took nearly all of the chase time, but ended up not being a problem since CSWR missed the tornado and did not deploy any pods. Thank goodness they were repaired in time for the Saturday trip to an unimpressive storm in eastern New Mexico!

(To be fair, it appears the only Vortex2 people who did actually see one of the Friday tornadoes saw it because they chose to stop for lunch at a McDonalds close to where the tornado decided it felt like spinning things up.)

Pod L has been repaired! (Note: Perrier is not a part of the pod, though I suppose it could be used as a way to gauge pressure. If I open the bottle and it explodes on me, I'll know the atmospheric pressure has gotten lower.)

In New Mexico, Probe 13 inhabitants and some Probe 12 NWS dude gaze at a rather pretty, but rather boring, tornado denying storm.

The flowers in New Mexico were pretty too. I think the state flower may be the oil well.