The Doppler on Wheels team, headed by Josh Wurman & Karen Kosiba, announced Wednesday on the FARM website the establishment of a new partnership with the University of Alabama Huntsville.
The partnership comes after several years of intense and focused research in the Southeastern United States by both organizations in an effort to better understand the characteristics of severe weather in our region, often referred to as “Dixie Alley”, a distinct geographical area compared to the traditional “Tornado Alley”.
The history of these pieces of hardware dates back to 1995 when the CSWR, or Center for Severe Weather Research, began operations of a network of mobile Doppler Radar trucks known as the DOWs, or Doppler on Wheels – and the investigative results were almost immediate: throughout the 90s, dozens of tornadoes were captured at very close range by the DOW team, led by Josh Wurman, revealing structures not yet seen by more legacy hardware, as well as measuring some of the most intense windspeeds ever recorded in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma on May 3rd, 1999, clocking in at a bafflingly high 318mph – interestingly a record only recently threatened by the Greenfield tornado, which was also captured by the Doppler on Wheels team (now apart of the broader Flexible Array of Radars & Mesonet organization, or FARM) earlier this year and was found to host winds in the same vicinity of 310+mph.
Back home in the Tennessee Valley, UAH has also more recently ventured into the scene of investigative severe weather research.Though hosting a well-respected Atmospheric Sciences program for many years prior, it wasn’t until 2015 that UAH opened the SWIRLL department, short for Severe Weather Institute – Radar & Lightning Laboratories – a focused institute dedicated to understanding severe weather using remote sensing tools such as radars, field-deployed sensors, and lightning detection systems.
In the 9 years since it’s opening, it has participated in dozens of research projects, such as PERiLS and VORTEX-SE, which both focused on the development of tornadoes in the Southeastern United State and Tennessee Valley, and which both also featured research conducted by UAH SWIRLL’s sibling of the DOWs, the Mobile Alabama X-band in concert with the DOW teams. More information is expected in the coming weeks regarding the new affiliation between the two organizations.
