Two days before the Kirksville, MO tornado (May 13, 2009), we drove the SRV to Radiance Technologies in Oxford, MS, where engineers Hank Rinehart and Mik Wimbrow were building us a radar to measure the horizontal and vertical winds inside a tornado.  We named this radar CLOVER (Close Range Vertical Radar) since the primary goal is to measure the updraft/downdraft winds inside a tornado, which has never been accomplished to our knowledge.  On May 11, CLOVER was ready to acquire experimental data, so Hank and Mik attached the radar to the back-right of the roof of the SRV for our storm chase in Missouri on May 13.  Here are the pictures and video from the radar installation at Radiance:

Since the Kirksville chase was the first time deploying CLOVER in the field, Hank rode with us and collected radar data when we were under wall clouds and inside the tornado.  The goal of this first chase was to collect experimental data so the radar software and hardware could be optimized at Radiance.  Instead, we got a little more than we bargained for and were able to collect wind data with CLOVER from inside an EF1 to EF2 tornado!  To our knowledge, this was the first time a mobile radar had collected data from within the tornado circulation.  Here is the video from the Kirkville tornado...For this experimental data collection chase, we oriented the radar antenna in the horizontal to measure the rotational winds.  We also measured a 97 mph wind out of the east with the roof-top mounted anemometer, which was in the northern weak side of the tornado, but correlated well with what we measured with CLOVER.  We'll likely be presenting the radar data soon, so stay tuned!