Beginning on 26 April 1998 and ending on about 16 June 1998, the inaugural ROTATE field campaign involved the interception of four tornadoes, including a violent F-4 tornado in the town of Spencer, SD. Later in the project, (8 June 1998), dual-Doppler was collected in one, and possibly two, tornadoes and ultra-fine resolution data (3x3x38m) was collected as a tornado passed within 170 m of one DOW.
A general synopsis of the 1998 season of ROTATE is as follows:
980426: Dual-Doppler deployment in non-tornadic thunderstorm west of Gatesville, TX. Storm had tornado warning and locals claimed there was a tornado. But this seems unlikely given our visual and radar observations. In any case, DOW2 failed to record data. Trip Map
980504: Uneventful chase to N of Lawton, TX. Moisture went away soon after we left Norman, OK. No data collected. Some system bugs detected.
980505: Storms finally broke strong cap, but were feeble. Some data collected near Denton in pre-storm boundary-layer.
980506: Intercepted two storms with mid level mesos ~40 m/s, but no low level rotation in Watonga, OK area. Storms became dominated by outflow and didn't seem vigorous enough.
980508: Intercepted non-tornadic storms in TX panhandle. Poor structure, little rotation.
980514: Intercepted non-tornadic squall line near OK/TX border S of I-40. Interesting single-Doppler data in strong shear couplet and later in outflow dominated section.
980519: Intercepted non-tornadic cells in SW NE and NE CO. Single-Doppler of limited interest.
980520: Dual-DOW intercept of F0/1 tornado in NE panhandle. Several minutes of data. Several deployments, some dual on supercell as it moved SE in NE panhandle.
980521: Intercepted tornado in Scottsbluff, NE
980522: Dual-DOW deployment on fine line with mobile mesonets
980523:
980524: Single-DOW deployment on hook echo and rotation, possible tornado on video, will review radar data.
980529: No data collected
980530: Intercept of violent Spencer, SD tornado. Genesis and mature phase (>100 m/s) sampled in two deployments spanning 20+ minutes.
980607: Went to SE CO while supercell went up in E NM. No data collected.
980608: Collected data in two tornadoes in Cambridge, KS. 2nd approached to 200m from DOW3. Limited dual-DOW in 2nd tornado with peak surface winds of 110-115 mph.
980609: Limited dual-DOW in coordination with sub-vortex-rfd in N TX.
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