Introduction - Severe Convective Storms and Tornadoes: Observations and Dynamics - page 15

non-meteorologists and serendipitously obtained radar measurements from fixed
site radars.
There were some organized efforts, however, in the 1950s to study some
aspects of severe storms. The pilots known as the ''Rough Riders'' penetrated
squall lines in the central U. S. during the Tornado Research Airplane Project
(TRAP). This project evolved into the National Severe Storm Project (NSSP) in
1961. An interesting finding from this project was that air tended to flow around
storms, as if storms were obstacles to the flow.
Neil Ward, who was responsible later for refining the tornado chamber, was
probably the first professional meteorologist to storm-chase and combine visual
observations with other measurements. He observed a tornadic storm near Geary,
Oklahoma on May 4, 1961. 1 The following year the type of storm Ward observed
was named a ''supercell'' by Keith Browning. Browning had been at Imperial
College working with Frank Ludlam and then at the Air Force Cambridge
Research Laboratory (AFCRL) radar in Sudbury, Massachusetts, under Dave
Atlas. Ward subsequently worked in Norman, Oklahoma at the National Severe
Storms Laboratory (NSSL), which formed as a merger in 1964 between the
Weather Radar Laboratory in Norman and the NSSP under the guidance of Ed
Kessler, who had done seminal work early in his career as a student at MIT on
precipitation and cloud kinematics and some radar studies. The same year Ward
went storm chasing, Fred Bates from St. Louis University in 1961 documented a
tornado he observed from an aircraft and noted how the tornado was far removed
from the precipitation in its parent storm.
Small field programs whose main purpose was to collect hailstones were
conducted in 1964 based at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in 1965 and
1966 in South Dakota and northeastern Colorado as part of Project Hailswath,
and at NSSL in 1966. There were larger hail field efforts in northeastern Colorado
organized by NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), the University
of Wyoming, and the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada
during the National Hail Research Experiment (NHRE) from 1972 to 1974. Other
programs included experiments in Switzerland, South Africa, and Alberta
(Canada), as well as in Bulgaria. While the aforementioned field programs were
focused on hail production, much was learned also about the parent storms
producing the hail, which in many instances were supercells.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, waterspouts in the Florida Keys were
studied by making airborne measurements. Airborne measurements made from
aircraft have been important over the years ( Figure 1.11 ). Joe Golden from
NOAA described the waterspout life cycle based on many visual observations
from aircraft; Verne Leverson, Pete Sinclair from Colorado State, and Golden
made in situ measurements from aircraft; and Ron Schwiesow from NOAA and
colleagues made remote wind measurements with a Doppler lidar (without the
capability of range discrimination) from aircraft. It was around this time that
meteorological Doppler radar was being developed, especially at NSSL, NCAR,
the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and Cornell Aeronautical Labora-

1 According to Ward,

'' ... transportation and communications were furnished by the

Oklahoma Highway Patrol.''