Blowing in the Wind

Texas Tech researchers seek answers to better predict future tornadoes.

By Texas Tech University

October 2^nd, 2025

Last spring a team of researchers from Texas Tech’s Department of Geosciences set out across the High Plains in search of tornadoes.

The Low-Level Internal Flows in Tornadoes, or LIFT, project was led by atmospheric science professor Chris Weiss. He and his team of graduate students collected data to try to better understand the mysterious weather phenomenon. The idea is, by learning more about how tornadoes form, scientists can more accurately predict that formation in the future.

The LIFT research specifically measures windspeeds of the tornado close to the ground.

“The lowest few tens of meters of a tornado cause the most destruction to infrastructure, yet this region remains one of the least observed,” doctoral student Joshua Ostaszewski explains.

So, the team has been working to cut a cross section of a tornado using two Ka-band Doppler radars mounted on the back of trucks to image this portion and better understand it. Because these radars operate at a higher frequency than most operational and research-grade radars, they allow the team to see very compact and shallow scales of motion, Weiss says.

To achieve this, the radars need to have a clear line of sight to the tornado.

“These radars can measure winds at an extremely high resolution, at the cost of range, meaning we have to get pretty close to the storm feature of interest,” says Isaac Arseneau, a doctoral candidate. “This region is especially difficult to study due to the inherent difficulty and risk of getting instruments close enough to a tornado to measure it, and even most mobile radars stay too far away to measure wind speeds close to the ground.”

This is one reason Texas Tech is an ideal jumping-off point for this type of research. Being on the South Plains makes Lubbock a great spot from which to react quickly and easily be within range of a target storm during storm season.

“Lubbock is rather ideally located,” Weiss notes. “The smooth terrain out here on the South Plains allows for a tremendous line-of-sight, which permits us to gather radar data effectively and be able to view the evolution of the target storm more safely.”

Additionally, Lubbock’s region of the southern High Plains possesses three unique characteristics that allow for more consistent tornado development than just about anywhere else in the world: the moisture provided by the Gulf; mountains to the west that help create a dryline and a strong jet stream, which provides the vertical wind shear that drives the rotation of supercells and, in part, tornadoes; and low pressure in the lee of the Rocky Mountains, which drives that moist Gulf air northward.

This proximity to storms gives the LIFT team a number of opportunities each spring to collect data. That leads to a lot of time on the road and, in the process, a lot of stories.

The most significant day for them last spring happened in Oklahoma, where the team caught up to a supercell thunderstorm just as it was producing a large, multi-vortex tornado, recalls Jessica McDonald, who received her doctorate from Texas Tech in 2024 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.

“This supercell had positioned itself in an area where there was not a solid road network, so there was really only one good road that gave us a position of the supercell that we could scan at,” adds Julia Buhrman, a master’s student. “The issue with this road was that it was narrow, accompanied by muddy ditches on either side, and was almost completely full of storm chaser traffic. We had to drive down the road beyond where the chasers were congregated so we could turn around and get the radar to face the storm.”

As the two radar operators for the LIFT team, McDonald and Buhrman were in separate trucks. Buhrman was in truck Ka1 when it got stuck as the driver tried to turn it around.

McDonald had to collect data alone with Ka2 while the rest of the crew raced to help get Ka1 unstuck – and the tornado was getting closer.

“Thankfully, we weren’t directly in the path,” remembered Arseneau, who was in the Ka1 truck with Buhrman. “We did eventually get unstuck and managed to gather some pretty groundbreaking data on the tornado later in its life cycle.”

And, oddly enough, the stuck radar truck helped them out.

“That unexpected delay actually put us in the perfect position to capture one of the most detailed Ka-band datasets of a tornado ever recorded,” Ostaszewski remembers.

Both radars were able to simultaneously collect groundbreaking data as the multi-vortex tornado consolidated into a stout cone tornado and moved away.

“Collecting data in those very trying conditions required an extreme amount of skill, teamwork and focus,” McDonald recalls. “I’m very proud of our radar teams for what we accomplished that day.”

As exciting as this work can be, though, each member of the LIFT team sees what the future impacts of their work can mean.

“Every time we head out into the field, I remind myself that the data we collect could help improve forecasts and warnings, ultimately saving lives,” Ostaszewski says.

It’s a sentiment shared by the whole group.

“Having seen a number of these destructive storms over the past 20 years, I have really grown to appreciate the human element of this work,” Weiss notes. “We can boil everything down to scientific hypotheses and methodology, but ultimately, people’s lives are being upended by these threats. That is the strongest motivation of all.”