VORTEX-SE_2018

VORTEX-SE is a research program focused on tornado issues of special concern in the southeastern United States. The overarching goal of VORTEX-SE is to reduce damage, injuries, and loss of life from tornadoes through improvements in understanding, forecasting and warning, and risk communication in ways that support protective decision making. This includes understanding and, where possible, providing recommendations for how to mitigate key vulnerabilities to tornadoes in the southeast US.

Physical science and observational advances that can help improve operational forecasts and warnings are important contributors to reducing loss of life from tornadoes in the southeast US. Contributions from the SBE sciences are also critical, to understand societal aspects of southeast tornado risks and to help meteorological advances achieve their potential for benefiting society. Thus, VORTEX-SE spans a range of disciplines, including atmospheric science, SBE (social, behavioral, and economic) sciences, and operational meteorology.

For the 2018 VORTEX-SE field campaign operations were focused in the Northern Alabama (Huntsville) and Northern Louisiana (Monroe) regions with a set of SMART-R mobile radars from the University of Oklahoma, a fixed radar and mobile soundings from the University of Louisiana-Monroe and a suite of fixed and mobile radars and mobile profiling systems from the University of Alabama-Huntsville. As in the 2016 and 2017 field campaigns, there are a number of research foci in both the physical sciences as well as the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.