Summer 2012: DC3 and drought

   Noticing that my two latest posts have been about serious stuff (took down a lengthy Chick-fil-A one to save space), I figured it was time for a weather-related entry.  Last year I lumped the whole summer's weather into one piece--it wasn't hard since I'd been in the Mountain State--and I'll just do the same this year.

   I had the chance to stay in Norman this summer, working for a National Severe Storms Lab scientist named Dr. MacGorman.  The day-to-day part of my job is data retrieval, processing, and archiving for the Oklahoma lightning mapping array (LMA).  The part you'd be interested in was a field project from May 15 to June 30, Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3), which involved all kinds of government agencies and a lot of researchers from around the nation.  The overall objectives dealt with how thunderstorms affect the chemistry of the troposphere, particularly how they transport substances from near the surface to the upper troposphere.  Where Dr. MacGorman and our team came in was taking in situ measurements of thunderstorms via balloon, as mobile radar crews and specially instrumented aircraft sampled the storms simultaneously.  We launched balloons that, when inflated, filled the back of a full-size U-Haul truck--which is exactly what we used to get them to launch sites.  Attached to each balloon, at least at first, were a particle imager, an electric field meter, and a regular radiosonde that measured temperature and humidity, as well as tracking devices.  As the project progressed, our balloons kept falling after reaching only 3-4 km into the atmosphere.  Since we were shooting for several times that altitude, the instruments for our final few launches were split between two balloons, which then topped 20 km.  Getting paid to chase storms was exhilarating, if sometimes exhausting, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.  Here are the highlights.

May 19:  DC3's first Oklahoma chase took us to the dryline in western/northwestern Oklahoma for high-based severe thunderstorms.  We stopped at an intersection at Leedey as the young storms grew.  The mobile mesonet (minivan with instruments on top) was my vehicle for most of the project.

We moved south to Moorewood to intercept and launch.  Two launch sites were decided against before we wound up in an open field near a small oil or natural gas facility.  

We launched successfully, though the balloon didn't reach its desired height.  At Arapaho, after the launch, we were treated to spectacular mammatus.

May 25:  After spending hours in an Altus, OK, gas station/Burger King, we ran down a left-moving severe storm near Erick.  We launched amid a barrage of close CGs but the instrument train dropped off the balloon before reaching cloud base.  A nice sunset was little consolation.

I spent the next week in Silver Spring, MD, at NOAA headquarters, for a scholarship orientation with three fellow rising juniors from the School of Meteorology.  We missed the best chases of the summer.

June 3:  Equipment failures made a trip to Memphis, TX, a total fiasco.  No launch.

June 4:  Paydirt in the middle of nowhere, roughly in the vicinity of Paducah, TX.  This was after driving through high winds and blowing dust to reach the storms.  We were surrounded by unsettlingly close CGs from launch time long into the night.  

June 12:  We blasted from Norman to Lubbock, TX, and immediately were in pursuit of supercells only a county away from the New Mexico border.  All the storms were splitting, and we positioned ourselves to catch a split from the only storm that didn't.  It left us in the dust, accelerating northward, and we proceeded to invade an IHOP near Texas Tech's campus.  We stayed up through the wee hours of the morning on the 13th to intercept an MCS moving into the Lubbock area.  It fell apart on top of us, yielding essentially no data, but letting us practice our new two-balloon procedure in driving cold rain.  Here's mammatus from the storms near New Mexico, in Seagraves, TX.

June 16:  It was one of several long, frustrating, and sometimes plain strange days wandering central Oklahoma in search of elusive pulse storms--ask me about the machete-waving motorcyclist in Binger sometime.  Persistence paid off with our best intercept.  We caught a severe storm just south of I-40 near Hydro, OK, and launched two balloons with lightning striking all around.  It was the first time I thought we were in serious danger from lightning, as we stood on top of a hill at an oil or gas platform and watched rapid-fire CGs hit in a valley below us.

We punched through this storm on I-40 in search of bathrooms around Hydro.  It was an intense experience to be piloting the mesonet.  Later, at a crop duster airstrip roughly north of Alfalfa, OK, a few crew members had their hair stand on end with a couple very close lightning strikes from decaying storms.  After the danger passed, the full arc of a double rainbow appeared.

   At the tail end of DC3, Oklahoma was plunged back into the bone-dry oven that is summer in the Southern Plains.  Norman went many weeks without receiving 0.1" of rain in a day.  Wildfires ravaged central and northeastern parts of the state, including a large area just south of Lake Thunderbird.  Flash forward to the last weekend of summer.  August 18 finally brought rain to central Oklahoma in the form of two morning/early afternoon sub-severe MCSs.  Here's the first one near Lexington, OK, and a roll cloud with the second one as it approaches OU's campus.

Higher education, not reeducation

Let me note again...my personal beliefs and views are my own and do not reflect those of my university or my employer.

   I have been informed that summer is over--rudely, by OU's don't-forget-classes-start-tomorrow mass email, and kindly, by the cool breeze through Essex Square's top landing.  So, back we go.  Or for you freshmen, here we go.  Don't worry.  We're all mad here.

   I guess it's mostly to new college students who are Christians, or who are considering becoming Christians, that I'm directing this post.  We can all relate to what you're about to encounter, but it's going to be nauseatingly fresh to you when it first reaches your eyes and ears and heart.  And just as I'm no longer offended by the compost aroma carried on the south wind directly to the National Weather Center parking lot, some of us geezers in our twenties have blocked out this stuff for long enough that we don't notice it anymore.  We might forget to prepare you, to the degree that we can.  So on behalf of us all, if you are attending a public university, here is your fair warning.

   No matter what you know to be true, no matter what everyone you love and respect has taught you, and no matter what has been accomplished in your own life, you will be presented with the following as facts in the near future:

Your life is dull.

Your standards are intolerant.

Your religion is hypocritical.

Your faith is unreasonable.

Your God is a lie.

   You can choose to accept these statements at face value, or you can challenge them.  That choice is yours and it's a monumental one.  I can't speak for the other side, but I chose to challenge this worldview.  I admit my execution of that choice has been shaky, but I have never reconsidered or regretted it.  When your professors and colleagues and friends give you these "facts," it really is okay to call their bluff by the way you live.  Here's how to start.

1.  Don't be conformed.

I can't understand the allure of wandering up the middle of the street at 1 a.m. Sunday, on your way out for the night, walking so you can become incapable of driving.  Of course it's fine--often necessary--to be a follower.  Just remember that the world's best followers are little furry guys called lemmings, famous for achieving terminal velocity en masse.  Know who you follow and why.  Be secure in standing out from the crowd.  Being in the minority doesn't mean you're alone, and it sure doesn't mean you're wrong.  Narrow is the gate.

2.  Beware of power distance.

In my introductory communication class last spring, we discussed the idea of power distance--how much of a person's authority or power in one area of life carries over into other areas, or how far that kind of power can get you.  Be aware of this phenomenon.  Your professor may be a brilliant scientist, and he or she deserves your respect in that field, but that doesn't make him or her a spiritual authority.  Faith is not science.  Many elite minds can't comprehend this.  The funny thing is, God meant for it to be that way.  Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-27 to see what our God thinks about this world's intellectuals and scholars.  When you hear precisely those people ranting about how foolish we are, it should bolster your faith because Paul, writing by the Spirit, knew two millennia ago that it would happen.

3.  Elect to receive.

I always cringe a little anytime OU's football team wins the coin toss and defers to the second half.  They're so explosive that if they start with the ball, they could very well be on the scoreboard within two minutes.  That sends a clear message to the other team and in OU's better seasons, the game is often over in the first quarter.  You have the same potential.  When you walk on campus, you've won the coin toss--choose to receive!  Take charge from the get-go by getting heavily involved with your church family.  Don't just play defense, trying not to give too much ground to temptation.  Go on offense, get stronger in your faith, and help reach out to others.  Draw first blood.  Put your adversary in a deep hole before anybody knows what happened.

  I hope this gives you a hint of what to expect on campus.  In spite of the challenges you'll face, the positives outweigh the negatives.  Maybe the biggest thing is that your faith becomes your own.  Nobody will wake you up on Sunday morning or keep an eye on you with the opposite sex or stay up till you come home at night anymore.  It is entirely between you and God.  In the face of so many new tests, your faith might not be all you want it to be for a while.  Mine still isn't.  But it's really yours, and you're better off working on a flawed, authentic faith than coasting along on somebody else's.  You're going to love the Christian college life.  I promise.