“A heart-racing experience,” University of Alabama in Huntsville undergraduate senior Zeb Leffler said of his latest storm-spotter experience.

Leffler and other UAH researchers were gathering storm data in Mississippi on March 24 under a tornado warning in the same weather line as the tornado that would destroy the small town of Rolling Fork, Miss., 40 miles away. The Rolling Fork tornado was three-quarters-of-a mile wide and on the ground for 59 miles. It killed 24 people and was rated an EF4, the second-highest level on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

“We kept seeing the cloud ceiling lower as the storm progressed closer to us,” Leffler said. “Cloud-to-ground lightning increased and a hail core was spotted using MAX’s radar, which usually indicates a storm’s intensity is increasing.” The university’s MAPNet Mobile Alabama X-Band Radar is known as MAX.

Zeppler and the other UAH researchers are studying what has become known as “Dixie Alley.” Like the Midwest’s Tornado Alley, the Southeast including Mississippi and Alabama is increasingly hit by big tornadoes but the South’s are harder to spot because of the region’s heavy rain, hills and trees.

More clarity from good data is what researchers are searching for and UAH is one of 12 research institutions chosen for the Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear Storms (PERiLS) study. Funded by the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, PERiLS is a three-year project now in its second year and is the largest Dixie Alley tornado field campaign to date.

Using mobile equipment and vehicles from UAH’s Severe Weather Institute and Radar & Lightning Laboratories (SWIRLL), the team set up around Greenville, Miss. “Between 4-5 p.m., our weather balloons and wind-profiling instrumentation picked up wind speeds increasing and turning rapidly with height, creating that spin in the atmosphere needed for tornadoes,” UAH Research Associate Preston Pangle said. “Also, the data showed instability ramping up. The atmosphere was priming itself for severe weather activity.”

Tornado warnings went out at 6 p.m. across the Mississippi Delta, including part of the UAH team’s research site. “Just five miles north-northeast of where we were located, the tornado-warned storm did produce golf ball sized hail,” Leffler said.

After the storm, the student researchers remembered the town and the people of Rolling Fork. “It’s heartbreaking to think about the devastation in Rolling Fork,” Atmospheric Science graduate student Joshua Huggins said. “A few of us stopped in Rolling Fork for lunch two years ago while site-surveying for tornado field campaigns. The folks were incredibly nice to us all and just downright good people.”

“This is why we, UAH, participate in tornado field campaigns so we can understand what types of weather conditions spark tornadic activity in squall lines across ‘Dixie Alley’ in the spring,” Huggins said. “We hope our research will lead to more warning time for violent tornadoes and save lives.”

And the campaign seems to be working. “This non-tornadic supercell had so much significant data collected on it, it could be the most studied event so far since beginning our tornado field campaigns,” said Dr. Kevin Knupp, director of UAH SWIRLL and Atmospheric and Earth Science professor.