TORNADO PROBABILITIES

Conditional Tornado Probabilities from Ruc-2 Forecasts

Accurately predicting the timing and location of tornadoes with lead times of more than a few tens of minutes will continue to be difficult, despite recent advances in numerical weather prediction. Tornadoes and the associated thunderstorms are smallscale phenomena, and the theory of chaos strongly suggests that such events will have a very short period of predictability (Lorenz 1969; Islam et ...

Diagnosis of Conditional Maximum Tornado Damage Probabilities

Considerable effort in recent decades has focused on near-storm environment interrogation via model-based planar fields (e.g., Stensrud et al. 1997) and model-based proximity soundings in order to discriminate between nontornadic and significant (> F2) tornado environments for supercells (e.g., Thompson et al. 2003, hereafter T03; Thompson et al. 2007). This emphasis in severe environment discr...

Tornado Warnings and Tornado Fatalities : The Case of May 22 , 2011 Tornado in Joplin , Missouri

Tornado Forecasting: A Review

Present-day operational tornado forecasting can be thought of in two parts: anticipation of tornadic potential in the storm environment, and recognition of tornadic storms once they develop. The former is a forecasting issue, while the latter is associated with warnings (or so-called nowcasting). This paper focuses on the forecasting aspect of tornadoes1, by dealing primarily with the relations...

Exponential Models: Approximations for Probabilities

Welch & Peers (1963) used a root-information prior to obtain posterior probabilities for a scalar parameter exponential model and showed that these Bayes probabilities had the confidence property to second order asymptotically. An important undercurrent of this indicates that the constant information reparameterization provides location model structure, for which the confidence property ...