New to chasing: looking for a mobile mesonet setup

[Sean Waugh]

The J-tube as outlined and depicted in the journal article that you cited Nick, was originally created for the VORTEX project almost 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the J-tube has a large variety of issues and caveats that go along with it's use that make it very difficult to use on any vehicles other than those specifically used by NSSL in the VORTEX projects (1 and 2). I won't go into the reasons behind this claim in this thread. These issues were not known during the J-tube's inception and use in VORTEX 1 (or any subsequent projects), and did not come to light until my undergraduate research. There are no formal publications as of yet (I'm working on it) outlining these issues, but I did present a poster at the recent Severe and Local Storms Conference in October of 2010 on this topic. In that poster I also introduced a new instrument shield, known as the U-tube, which myself and Sherman Fredrickson developed for the VORTEX 2 project that combat's all of the J-tube's issues.

I believe I have several post in that previous thread (Would you Mobile Mesonet for Science?) discussing at length the issues with mobile instrumentation, including the J-tube. If you'd like to discuss it further I'd be happy to, though I think the conversation would be better suited to email or PM to avoid spamming this thread. That invitation extends to anyone interested btw.

 

[Bruce Cartwright]

This is an old thread and I'm probably the last one to read it but who knows. I'm just a WX enthusiast and have no experience chasing. I living on coast of southern New England It's unlikely I'll ever see a tornado never mind chasing.

Based on the comments on this thread I have a comment which is more includes a question. If a novice chaser want's to experiment with instruments and data collection I can understand. As long as he/she accepts that the data is not going to be reliable and certainly useless to a serious researcher it can be a learning experience. Now the question part. For data collection I wonder if accuracy of the sensors is really important as long as the delta is linear. i.e., does it matter if the current bp is on novice's instruments reads 30 and the scientist's instruments reads 29 as long as the sensor's are good enough to have an accurate delta. i.e, if both show a drop of 10mm the data should be perfectly good to learn some reasonably interesting analysis. For the enthusiast level data collector I personally wouldn't bother with more the TPH. I think wind data is a joke unless you are a serious scientist with a megabucks annomonitor.

As I said earlier on I live in New England and tornado chasing is an outlier on the curve for me however we have hurricanes. Yeah, a tornado's winds can be very high but Hurricanes can be pretty high too. We may have different scales but 110 mph wind can and will do serious damage and take lives as well. Personally I think I'd rather be in tornado ally. Even the largest tornado don't get much more than 2 miles across and can pass through at 50 mph. I appreciate that the warning system is still pretty slow and that contributes highly to the risk of serious injury and/or death. With a hurricane you can get very high winds but over a magnitude wider and lasting for 6, 8, hours or so. I guess everything is relative. That definitely is not to downplay tornados, I respect chasers deeply and if I lived down there I'd probably want to be one (I'm a research junkie and an adrenaline junkie as well).

Though probably nobody will read this response never mind reply, I had fun expressing my thoughts.

BTW, I found this whole thread and references from it very interesting and informative.