how they can be more accurately predicted,” said Stephan Nelson, NSF program director for physical and dynamic meteorology. VORTEX had the capability to fly Doppler weather radar above the tornado approximately every five minutes. VORTEX research helped the National Weather Service (NWS) to provide tornado warnings to residents with a lead time of 13 minutes. A federal research meteorologist, Don Burgess, estimates that the "false alarms" pertaining to severe weather by the National Weather Service have declined by 10 percent. The movie Twister was at least partially inspired by the VORTEX project. VORTEX2 VORTEX2 was an expanded second VORTEX project, with field phases from 10 May until 13 June 2009 and 1 May until 15 June 2010. VORTEX2's goals were studying why some thunderstorms produce tornadoes while others do not, and learning about tornado structure, in order to make more accurate tornado forecasts and warnings with longer lead time. VORTEX2 was by far the largest and most ambitious tornado study ever with over 100 scientific participants from many different universities and research laboratories. "We still do not completely understand the processes that lead to tornado formation and shape its development. We hope that VORTEX2 will provide the data we need to learn more about the development of tornadoes and in time help forecasters give people more advance warning before a tornado strikes," said Roger Wakimoto, director of the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a principal investigator for VORTEX2. "Then you can get first responders to be better prepared—police, fire, medical personnel, even power companies. Now, that's not even remotely possible," said Stephan P. Nelson, a program director in the atmospheric sciences division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Joshua Wurman, president of the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in Boulder, Colorado proposes, "if we can increase that lead time from 13 minutes to half an hour, then the average person at home could do something different. Maybe they can seek a community shelter instead of just going into their bathtub. Maybe they can get their family to better safety if we can give them a longer warning and a more precise warning." VORTEX2 deployed 50 vehicles customized with mobile radar, including the Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radars, SMART radars, the NOXP radar, a fleet of instrumented vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), deployable instrument arrays called Sticknet and Podnet, and mobile weather