By Murray Evans, Associated Press Writer

NORMAN — Researchers, scientists and forecasters gathered at the National Weather Center on Friday to complete preparations for an $11.9 million project being touted as the largest ever attempt to study tornadoes.

The initial phase of the Verification of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 — also called Vortex2 — will start Sunday and run through June 13. A second phase will run from May 1 through June 15 next year.

During the study, researchers hope to sample supercell thunderstorms in an effort to learn more about how tornadoes form and the damage they can cause.

Joshua Wurman, president of Center for Severe Weather Research in Boul-der, Colo., and one of the project’s lead principal in-vestigators, said the goal eventually is to improve lead times on tornado warnings to the public. The average warning time nationally is 13 minutes, he said.

“If we can increase that lead time from 13 minutes to half an hour, then the average person at home could do something different,” Wur-man said. “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.”

More than 120 scientists and crew members traveling in about 40 vehicles will follow storms in a 900-mile area that includes western and central Oklahoma, southeastern South Dakota, western Iowa, eastern Colo-rado, far northwestern Mis-souri, far southwestern Minnesota, most of Nebras-ka and Kansas and the Texas Panhandle.

The experiment will be based out of the National Weather Center in Norman.

Weather equipment to be deployed during the study will include multiple types of radar, mobile Mesonets, mobile ballooning systems, unmanned aircraft, tornado pods and particle probes.

“We’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it,” Wurman said. “Almost anything you can imagine we’re trying to use to observe these storms, all different directions in all different ways.”

The project is being funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini-stration, the National Sci-ence Foundation, 10 universities and three nonprofit organizations.

Brad Small, the associate director of the physical and dynamic meteorology program within the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences in Arlington, Va., called the experiment an unprecedented collaboration.

“We’re not only addressing the problems at hand, we’re also educating the future generation of scientists,” Small said.

One of that generation is 25-year-old Alex Gibbs, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska. Gibbs will be part of team driving a vehicle with tornado pods, which are used to measure wind velocity and direction and ground level, ideally in the core flow of a tornado.

“If you’re interested in severe weather, this is the only way to study,” Gibbs said. “It’s a good way to put everything you’ve learned to use.”

The original Vortex program operated in the central Great Plains during 1994 and 1995 and documented the entire life cycle of a tornado for the first time.

Don Burgess, a retired federal research meteorologist who now works part-time with the University of Oklahoma’s Cooperative In-stitute for Mesoscale Mete-orological Studies, said that study helped improve the so-called “false alarm” ratio of National Weather Service’s severe weather warning statistics by 10 percent.

During Vortex2, meteorologists at the National Weather Center will pass along forecast information to scientists in the field, who then will decide where their convoy will head for the day. While gathering storm information, the crews in the field also will pass along real-time information to local National Weather Service offices.

Penn State University will host a preliminary research workshop this fall to discuss the initial findings from the first phase of the Vortex2 project and to begin planning for its 2010 phase.

“Even though this field phase seems to be the most spectacular and seems like it’s a lot of work, by far the majority of what we’re doing is when we go back to our labs, when we work with each other, when we work with our students to try to figure out just what is it that we’ve collected,” Wurman said. “It’s going to take years to digest this data and to really get the benefit of this.”