The Low-level Internal Flow of Tornadoes (LIFT) Experiment: Observations from the 2024 and 2025 Campaigns

It is well recognized that tornadoes represent a significant disruption to society, both in terms of human tolls and economic impacts.  Inasmuch as we continue to make strides in our understanding of storm-scale processes relevant to the genesis of tornadoes, there remains a less explored, but equally important, state space on the scale of the tornado itself that is important in comprehending their impact and anticipating their maintenance.

The Low-Level Internal Flow of Tornadoes (LIFT) field campaign, part of the Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment – USA (VORTEX-USA) program, was conceived to specifically address the matter of near-surface wind fields through intensive high-resolution observation.  As part of this project, radar and in situ assets from Texas Tech University and the National Severe Storms Laboratory were deployed in the field for the spring seasons of 2024 and 2025 to make significant gains both in our understanding of the low-level processes and structure within the tornado (e.g., azimuthally averaged core/outer flow, subvortex characterization, tornado inflow layer, corner flow) and the resulting effects on land cover and the built environment (e.g., association of radar-level winds with damage, extrapolation of winds to ground from the typical lowest operational radar coverage).

The LIFT project sampled five tornadoes in 2024 and (as of the time this abstract was written) six in 2025, spanning a range of intensity from EF0 to EF3 (Hawley, TX – 2 May 2024, Arnett, OK – 18 May 2025).  This presentation will detail observations of these tornadoes from the perspective of the Texas Tech Ka-band mobile Doppler radars and the National Severe Storms Laboratory lidar.  For cases such as Eldorado, OK (23 May 2024), analyses of the three-dimensional wind field will be shown in a vortex-relative framework.  Further, novel observations of storm-scale attributes will be presented, features that have been recently suggested to influence tornado production in supercell storms such as the streamwise vorticity current and vorticity “worms” within the near-field inflow environment.