Arnold Closing Thoughts

 

The past two weeks seemed almost like a blur, from blasting out west from Maryland to climbing the mountains of Colorado, SWIFT has been a blast. Learning more about supercells, mesocyclones, and tornadoes in the field has been an extremely rewarding experience. The most rewarding part of SWIFT for me was learning how to collect and analyze real world observations with the HRRR model. This gave me the opportunity to learn how the real environment may slightly or vastly differ from the environment the model provides. These analyses helped me understand the importance of understanding potential failure modes or reasons why the day may end up being a bust. Comparing the two often yields great validation or sadness given the SPC risk category for a given day. As Bill Bunting put it at the end of the day the models are always wrong but it’s up to us to determine what it actually represents well.

                Starting from our first day out here I’ve been trying to gather footage of these storms so everyone back at home can see what we saw. Now that everything is ending, I’ve finally had enough time to edit and upload the drone videos everyone has been waiting for. (No Drones were hurt in the making of these videos)

In this clip you can see the progression of a wall cloud as it begins to form. The timelapse doesn’t do it justice for showing how big the feature actually is.

Here is a low-level video of the perfect Mesocyclone we chased. Once again, this feature was a lot bigger than the drone can accurately show.

This was us on climbing one of mountains in Colorado and enjoying the view. Don’t let the video fool you, this climb was no joke!!

This was by far one of the largest shelf clouds we saw on the trip. This one feature’s outflow was almost enough to take down the drone

This timelapse was produced by speeding up the video to 4 times speed. It shows the rotation within the supercell and even hints at possibly dropping a tornado given it had all of the ingredients necessary.

This all wouldn’t be possible without an awesome team and classmates. Thank you again for following us on this Internship. It has been great.