By James S. Tyree
The Oklahoman

About 120 people from 18 universities and government agencies recently spent 35 days driving 11,000 miles to find and study tornadic storms for VORTEX2, the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment.

May 10 through June 13, they found just one twister.

"It was the least number in that time period since the early 1990s, and only twice since World War II,” said Don Burgess , a University of Oklahoma research scientist. "Mother Nature likes to play tricks on us. ... That’s why we planned for VORTEX2 to be a two-spring experiment, because any one spring can be a bad year.”

The first year of VORTEX2 still proved beneficial, said Burgess, with OU’s Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale and Meteorological Studies . Teams found and recorded information from three tornadic storms that did not produce tornadoes.

Part of the VORTEX2 mission is to research all tornadic storms so meteorologists can learn why some develop tornadoes and others don’t.

The students and scientists also became familiar with their 40 vehicles, 11 mobile radars and 80 other separately placed instruments as they spent 20 of the 35 days collecting storm data. The original VORTEX project of 1994-95 had only one radar.

"We had so much more of everything, we had to figure out how to make it all work together,” Burgess said.

Robin Tanamachi, a graduate research assistant at the OU School of Meteorology , was part of a three-person team that put its radar closest to the wall cloud and read its scans. The team’s radar was the "smallest and most nearsighted,” she said, but its truck also was small and nimble.

Chasing storms that didn’t pan out was frustrating, she said, but the VORTEX2 teams finally got their chance with a strong EF-3 tornado that lasted about 30 minutes in far southeast Wyoming.

"My focus was primarily on making sure we had a good deployment spot and strategies,” Tanamachi said. "We also had a crew from The Weather Channel with us, so I was all miked up and had a camera in my face, but the deployment went off very well.”

The VORTEX2 teams are scheduled to head out next spring, hoping to encounter more tornadoes.

In the meantime, Burgess said everyone involved "will be busy from the dog days of summer through the long winter” breaking down and analyzing the information gathered this year.

"The data we collect will feed back into warning decision-making systems and hopefully help us make better warnings,” Tanamachi said.