On the Road Again
June 11th marked a huge milestone for the SERGE team, our first chase of the summer! We were able to finish the new probe, nicknamed “Zephyr” that morning and take some data from it! Although relatively uneventful, the day was extremely insightful into what issues we needed to fix for the following chases. The day was forecasted to have two sections of storms near the Wisconsin - Illinois border. The first being a weaker set of storms rolling in around 12:00pm, while the other was coming in later at around 6:00pm. We got up early and started what we would think would be the final modifications to the probe. Oh boy were we wrong
One thing led to the next, and before we knew it there were a bunch of tasks that needed to be completed before Zephyr would be operational in some sort of capacity. Crunch time set in as I began finalizing the sensor code and Mason worked on putting the hardware inside the probe itself. In our blitz to get everything working, Mason stepped outside to put something in the truck, before muttering “Hey Eli, I think it’s here already"Confused, I stepped out of the garage to see a massive shelf cloud from the first set of storms roll in above us. After realizing our schedule to try and intercept the second set of storms, we both scrambled to finish the few things that remained. And after a very enduring 5 hours, we had finally set up everything in the truck and were ready to hit the road! After some Chick fil a of course.
The actual storm intercept began with us heading south towards Genoa City on the border. We followed a beautiful line of severe thunderstorms, all producing extremely damaging front line wind gusts. During this time, our probe was able to successfully capture and log multiple environmental variables about this storm. This was an extreme morale boost, to see something we had been working so hard on finally come into fruition, although not in some area just yet.
Sadly being a time crunch due to my late working schedule, we made the decision to proceed southwest towards Kirkland, before getting stopped by the line of storms. We entered into the straight line of thunderstorms and quickly lost all visibility from the rain. We were able to report multiple things in this environment to the National Weather Service, from the flash flooding occuring to the branches whipping around all around us from the heavy winds.
As we proceeded on our way back through the heart of the storm, an error message popped up on my laptop. My heart sank as one of our sensors had died out for an unknown reason. A couple seconds later, and so did our other. We both guessed that the heavy wind and rain led to some water getting into our electronics. So in a last ditch effort, we pulled over at a gas station and hopped around to the probe in the trunk. I held Mason’s polo over him to stop the water getting blown into the probe as he opened up the cover. He quickly discovered an issue with the wires and repaired it. However, it proved futile as the sensors were still reporting errors in our program.
We eventually returned back, to which after celebrating our first chase of the season, got to making our todo list to improve the entire workflow, from the probe to how we saw our data. We then took apart our nuclear shield, and sadly saw water droplets on our electronics. This however, is an issue to be solved another day.
It was an absolute blast to be out in the field again, and my friend Mason reciprocated the same exact feelings. Although this first chase was a little bit clunky, and for sure had its moments. (Like realizing you forgot to drill a hole in the two metal bars you welded together, oops) it had a lot of good learning opportunities for the both of us. All this really means is that the next chase will be so much better!