No, a tornado is not heading toward Enterprise Park at Calverton.
But don't be surprised to see a storm chaser -- Doppler on wheels -- streaking toward EPCAL soon.
At Thursday's Riverhead Town board work session, Mount Sinai meteorology professor Lisa Bastiaans of the "DREAMS” project -- Doppler Radar for Education And Mesoscale Studies -- asked for permission to use EPCAL for scientific research.
The DREAMS project, she said, is funded by a grant award to Stony Brook University, and will be performed in collaboration with the National Weather Service.
"The purpose of the project is to study sea breeze development on Long Island and how it may help thunderstorms to develop," she said.
Scientists and students will study the sea breeze as it develops on the south shore of Long Island and tracks north. Typically, Bastiaans, said, the sea breeze develops in mid to late morning and heads north to the Long Island Expressway, where it "stalls for a couple of hours. That's something we'd like to investigate," she said. Next, she said, the breeze "races toward the north shore."
The Doppler on Wheels, or DOW, will arrive Monday; an open house will be held at Stony Brook University and teachers and the public are encouraged to attend and listen to a presentation by research scientists who "chase tornadoes with this vehicle."
Bastiaans said her goal was to seek permission to utilize public spaces for the research, including Smith Point County Park and Floyd Bennett Field.
The DOW will be driven northward, stopping at different sites; the group was seeking an inland central site such as EPCAL.
Farms are also another possibility; Bastiaans said she is working with Joe Gergela of the Long Island Farm Bureau to find farmers "who have a keen interest in weather, that might allow us to use a fallow field," to collect data.
Jeff Tongue, science and operations officer at the weather forecast office in New York -- and the National Weather Service lead on the project -- said the research will be completed in a little less than three weeks, by July 3."The portable Doppler radar has been used for chasing things like tornadoes across the Midwest -- but we don't expect to chase any tornadoes on Long Island," he said. "We want to look at local meteorology up close, closer than we normally do."
Sea breezes will be studied as they circulate, as will thunderstorms, as they "develop or decay," Tongue said.
The project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant, he added.
Approximately 30 special weather balloons will be released, with data collected by both scientists and students.
Bastiaans said an alternate site for study would be the Wading River beach; board members said the overflow parking lot should work.
The town agreed to green light the project and said a license agreement would be necessary.
In addition, Bastiaans said the Doppler mobile unit would be brought to the Tanger Outlet Center in Riverhead. "We want to engage in education and create future scientists," she said.
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