Mobile radar observation of tornadoes

Starting in the mid-1900s, mobile radar vehicles were being used for academic and military research. In the late 1900s, mobile doppler weather radars were designed and created with the goal to study atmospheric phenomena.

History
Mobile doppler weather radars have been used on dozens of scientific and academic research projects from their invention in the late 1900s. One problems facing meteorological researchers was the fact that mesonets and other ground-based observation methods were being deployed too slow in order to accurately measure and study high-impact atmospheric phenomena. Between 1994-1995, the first Doppler on Wheels was constructed and was deployed for the first time at the end of the VORTEX1 Project. The Doppler on Wheels led to several scientific breakthroughs and theories regarding tornadoes. The Doppler on Wheels also led to the “first tornado wind maps, measurements of an axial downdraft and lofted debris, multiple vortices, winds versus damage and surface measurement intercomparisons, winds as low as 3 - 4 m above the ground level and low-level inflow, 3D ground-based velocity track display (GBVTD) vector wind field retrievals, rapid evolution of debris over varying land use and terrain, documentation of cyclonic/anticyclonic tornado pairs and documentation of varied and complex tornado wind field structures including multiple wind field maxima and multiple vortex mesocyclones, downward propagation of vorticity and an extensive climatology of tornado intensity and size revealing, quantitatively, that tornadoes are much more intense and larger than indicated by damage surveys.”

In 2011, Howard Bluestein, a research professor at the University of Oklahoma, led a team to develop the Rapid X-band Polarimetric Radar (RaXPol). In 2013, researchers published to the American Meteorological Society that RaXPol was created because “the need for rapidly scanning weather radars for observing fast-changing weather phenomena such as convective storms, microbursts, small-scale features in hurricanes, and the process of convective development has been well established” throughout history. This included publications by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1983, research by several scientists published in 2001, and published research by the U.S. federal government in 2012. The United States Department of Defense gave the University of Oklahoma over $5 million dollars (2019 USD) in the development of new mobile radars, which were set to be used by the United States Navy.

In 2023, the University of Oklahoma, along with the National Severe Storms Laboratory developed and deployed the first ever mobile phased array radar (HORUS).

List of notable observations
Several tornadoes throughout the last few decades have been observed by various mobile radars. However, only the most notable ones are used for academic research and subsequently published. This is a list of known tornadoes which were observed by mobile radars.