On Sunday, May 17, NSSL’s Low-level Internal Flows in Tornadoes (LIFT) project sampled a strong tornado in Nebraska with its truck-mounted LiDAR and mobile mesonets.
That morning, LIFT researchers deployed to southeast Nebraska with a fleet of mobile instrumentation, including mobile mesonets, HailCam and LiDAR. As supercells formed, the LIFT teams used skill, experience and carefully planned strategies to position their instruments in close range as a tornado began to form. As the tornado strengthened and moved across the landscape, the truck-mounted LiDAR sampled the near-ground flow in the storm at about 300 feet above ground. Mobile mesonets captured the temperature and winds at very close range on both sides of it, providing important surface-level observations. This type of data of both the tornado itself AND its formation at such close range and proximity to ground is rare and valuable.
LIFT is supported by the NOAA VORTEX-USA program, which seeks to improve tornado forecasts and public preparedness.
Detailed observations of the winds very close to the ground are needed to advance our understanding of tornado formation and to better protect the public from their devastating impacts.
“These are not easy observations to get,” said Mike Coniglio, NSSL VORTEX Program Lead. “We’re trying to measure winds in the lowest few hundred feet above the ground, which requires us to get close and without hills or trees blocking the beam. Our team has built expertise over years to now do this safely and efficiently.”
The all-important and difficult work to process and synthesize the data is underway, but LIFT scientists are confident the LiDAR captured the surrounding near-ground wind field as this intense tornado formed, a type of dataset that’s been elusive in the severe weather community.
On Monday, May 18, LIFT teams were again in place to capture the near-ground flow patterns leading up to a tornado. This time, LIFT collaborators from Texas Tech University, captured radar data of the inner parts of the storm showing what NSSL suspects is a different tornado genesis mechanism than the one observed in Sunday’s tornado.
Key to the science of understanding these processes, LIFT also observed the near-ground winds in storms that did not subsequently produce tornadoes, serving as important comparison data to the tornadic datasets.
Made up of several components, LIFT seeks to better understand the structure of tornadoes and other severe weather hazards and how they form by gathering vital, yet difficult-to-obtain observations in close proximity to tornadoes and extreme hail.
Led by NSSL and in collaboration with Texas Tech University, and theCooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO), LIFT, which kicked off in 2025, involves deploying an advancedarray of mobile instrumentsinto the paths of potentially tornadic storms. This includes truck-mounted radars, LiDARS, mobile mesonets, and uncrewed aerial systems (UAS).
