• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

Rocket Man is Back

Dan Robinson said:
With all of the criticism of Reed's methods, has anyone in the science community actually reached out to his group? It seems that if some were willing to supply collaborative consulting and/or instrumentation to their efforts, that maybe something useful *could* be accomplished.
Click to expand...

AFAIK, there was conversation between TWISTEX and Reed (& team) back in the TWISTEX days about collaborating on data, but I recall Reed saying he preferred to go his own way. Not sure if he ever talked to Josh Wurman or other VORTEX2 crew about data sharing, but I recall Wurman not being warm to the idea of letting TWISTEX use VORTEX2/CSWR data (presuming a two-way-street agreement, which was never reached). But given RT has published and presented zero data since his 17 June 2009 intercept of the Aurora tornado (which itself was always questionable due to exposure effects), I remain skeptical that we will ever see anything scientifically meaningful come out of this particular event.
 
I've played with commercial sensors building homemade radiosondes. The posted board looks similar to most payloads I've designed. Most parts appear to be pretty run of the mill - but put together very nicely. I'm no EE, but I'd love to see a list of what sensors they actually used because at this point I've played with a decent number of them.

For pressure, I'd be decently willing to trust their data. Most barometers I've used are pretty good across a range of temperatures, pressures and can deal with pretty quick changes in pressure. I'm partial to the HP206C sensor, which has performed quite well in my launches and in tests in a vacuum jar. Others are perfectly acceptable too. So that data, at least, is likely usable.

GPS is actually pretty good at position and they have 1Hz updates. I've used the exact sensor they used. It performs quite well in my experience. Getting the data to 3d space is pretty easy and they can do some crude motion analysis based on it. You can wave your hands at the updraft speed and rotation at least. Is it scientific? No, not really, but it definitely is interesting. As is a 3d plot of GPS locations as a KMZ, which I think is the most useful thing they can do. Both are easy and frankly they should have that done by now.

My experience with small temperature sensor is much less encouraging. Most do not perform well on balloon launches, which are less demanding than this application. The LMS6, the NWS radiosonde, has temperature probes that have been calibrated for flight. They launch calibration balloons with 5 different temp sensors that have been painted with known absorptivity values and calibrate against that. In my experience, the kind of temperate sensors this probe seems to use are pretty poor performing, with a substantially warm bias. I had particularly poor experience with the MCP9808 on a launch this year, with it reading ~ 10ºC warm consistently, compared against the NWS sounding at the same time. Bead thermistors are more common in commercial radiosondes than chip based ones. I am very skeptical of any temp data they show.

In general, the thermometers are similar performing to moisture sensors: most are going to be RH and people use the Arden Buck equations to try and derive a dew point. I've launched thin film polymer capacitors as my normal sensor and they're acceptable, but without good temperature measurements anything is going to be kinda useless.

They might be able to show some interesting correlations between pressure and updraft speed, along with the path lofted debris take (though the CC of the debris fallout yesterday does a nice job of that too). Nothing here to justify what he's doing, but that's his choice.

It's far less interesting than the successful launch of the Torus balloon into the updraft a couple days ago...or a lot of the data they're getting.
 
If his sensor landed in Smithville, MO from Lawrence, KS I would be very interested. Still can't get over that dual pole debris fallout.

Anyway the meteorology community needs to collaborate better. It's not research vs ops. It's science!
 
I find it interesting that they chose not to invest more in recovery systems considering the fact that would reveal more in depth data. Although it is likely just time restraints preventing licenses for the appropriate recovery systems, it makes you wonder how much of this really is “for the science” and not publicity. (Feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting this)
https://twitter.com/x/status/1134119337646809089
 
Looks like the rocket entered the low-level meso and orbited it and/or the mid-level mesocyclone 1.25 times before being ejected from the updraft near storm top where it then was blown downstream by upper-level storm relative winds.

Alright...so what? This isn't really anything except corroboratory of basic supercell kinematics. We know this kind of flow structure from Doppler radar observations and all the instances of people finding debris miles downstream from where a tornado struck.

As @Dave C said, this whole thing would be more useful and interesting if they had launched several rockets in rapid succession/close proximity and seen where each one traveled (i.e., a packet trajectory analysis).
 
They've found the rocket and instruments. Should be interesting to see them reconstruct. I will say that I've seen too many research type people here and on social media unwilling to think outside of the current thinking. Maybe we're currently wrong? Maybe this unlocks something we hadn't considered. Maybe it's all gimmick. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but people sure are fast to condemn Reed.
 
Sounds to me like he's kicking the butt of the scientific community. Despite being a critic of his antics, I will give him credit when it's deserved -- especially when he's publishing data. I don't see any discord from any legitimate researcher or organization to debunk the project or the data. It really makes the larger scale projects seem rather silly right now as he totally drains the PR energy from them like a vampire. Maybe some of the funding from those projects should be directed towards him unless other scientists have the ba11s to challenge the data.
 
Last edited:
Shooting "a" rocket into a tornado is not "draining energy" from real projects like TORUS. Maybe if he proposed an actual science-based project, he could get funds that go to science-based projects?
 
Last year I attended a seminar here in Phoenix. It was hosted by Reed Timmer. He had several probes on display that he and his team were working on. They were legit.
I agree with Warren, his antics are influencing less skilled chasers to do dangerous stuff, but I must admit, I do enjoy watching some of his stuff. He obviously is putting some of his earnings back into research.
That being said, Warren Faidley had the biggest impact on my early chasing over twenty years ago. I still use terms from his books "Stormchaser" all the time. My favorite is "chasers compression" which is how the distance between two areas seems to get smaller the more times you travel it. I say that each time I drive between Amarillo and Oklahoma City.
 
Kem Poyner said:
Last year I attended a seminar here in Phoenix. It was hosted by Reed Timmer. He had several probes on display that he and his team were working on. They were legit.
I agree with Warren, his antics are influencing less skilled chasers to do dangerous stuff, but I must admit, I do enjoy watching some of his stuff. He obviously is putting some of his earnings back into research.
That being said, Warren Faidley had the biggest impact on my early chasing over twenty years ago. I still use terms from his books "Stormchaser" all the time. My favorite is "chasers compression" which is how the distance between two areas seems to get smaller the more times you travel it. I say that each time I drive between Amarillo and Oklahoma City.
Click to expand...

Thanks kindly.
 
As I understand it, the rocket was found at the KCI airport. There was also a lot of other debris that landed there, so much that the airport had to be closed for cleanup. Some of the debris was from the nursery that was hit, 47 miles from the airport. This would suggest, at least, that the rocket travelled in a similar trajectory to a lot of the other tornado debris. I would think that if the trajectory was successfully measured and data on pressure, wind, etc. was also obtained (both big "ifs") this could be of some scientific value. I do hope he shares the data with scientists, including perhaps the TORUS team.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top