balloon launching equipment. More than 100 scientists and crew researched tornadoes and supercell thunderstorms in the "Tornado Alley" region of the United States' Great Plains between Texas and Minnesota. A number of institutions and countries were involved in the US$11.9 million project, including: the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its National Weather Service and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) therein, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Environment Canada, and universities across the United States and elsewhere. The project included DOW3, DOW6, DOW7, Rapid-Scan DOW, SMART-RADARs, NOXP, UMASS-X, UMASS-W, CIRPAS and TIV 2 for their mobile radar contingent. The Doppler on Wheels were supplied by the Center for Severe Weather Research, and the SMART-Radars from the University of Oklahoma (OU). The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) supplied the NOXP radar, as well as several other radar units from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and Texas Tech University (TTU). NSSL and CSWR supplied mobile mesonet fleets. Mobile radiosonde launching vehicles were provided by NSSL, NCAR, and the State University of New York at Oswego (SUNY Oswego). There were quite a few other deployable state-of-the-art instrumentation, such as Sticknets from TTU, tornado PODS from CSWR, and four disdrometers from University of Colorado CU, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). VORTEX2 technology allowed trucks with radar to be placed in and near tornadic storms and allowed continuous observations of the tornadic activity. Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma said, "We will be able to distinguish between rain, hail, dust, debris, flying cows." Additionally, photogrammetry teams, damage survey teams, unmanned aircraft, and weather balloon launching vans helped to surround the tornadoes and thunderstorms. The equipment amassed enabled three-dimensional data sets of the storms to be collected with radars and other instruments every 75 seconds (more frequently for some individual instruments), and resolution of the tornado and tornadic storm cells as close as . Scientists met May 10 and held a class to teach the crews how to launch the tornado pods, which would have to be released within 45 seconds of notification. VORTEX2 was equipped with 12 tornado PODS, instruments mounted onto towers that measure wind velocity (i.e. speed and direction). The aim was that some of the measurements would be taken in the center of the tornado. Once the pods are deployed,