An experimental study was conducted to quantify the characteristics of a tornado-like vortex and to reveal the dynamics of the flow-structure interactions between a low-rise, gable-roof building model and swirling, turbulent tornado-like winds. The experimental work was conducted by using a large-scale tornado simulator located in the Aerospace Engineering Department of Iowa State University. I...

A climatology is developed for tornadoes during 1980–2012 in the British Isles, defined in this article as England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. The climatology includes parent storm type, interannual variability, annual and diurnal cycles, intensities, occurrence of outbreaks (defined as three or more tornadoes in the same day), ...

Despite conceptual links between disaster exposure and substance use, few studies have examined prevalence and risk factors for adolescent substance use and abuse in large, population-based samples affected by a recent natural disaster. We addressed this gap using a novel address-based sampling methodology to interview adolescents and parents who were affected by the 4th deadliest tornado outbr...

Recent evidence suggests that tornado report counts for monthly or longer periods may be correlated to climate indices in space and time. However, climatological analysis of tornado reports is complicated by reporting errors, the non-Gaussian nature of count data and rare events, and the presence of spatial and temporal correlation. Typically, such factors have not been formally included in the...

The principle features of tornado climatology in the UK are presented based on the 5-year period from January 1995. Just over one third of reported tornadoes occurred in the south-east region of England, and most tornado activity took place during the spring and summer while the least activity occurred during autumn. This was different to the seasonal distribution for the period from 1960 to 19...

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is developing both a tornadic and severe nontornadic sample of supercell storms from 2014. This latest work is an extension of earlier research which led to the development of conditional probabilities of tornado damage rating from near-storm environment and radar-based storm-scale characteristics from a 5-year sample of tornadoes (4,770) reported in the contig...

The tornado that struck Milwaukee, WI on March 8, 2000 was the earliest on record. Unlike most tornadoes, this particular tornado was not associated with a supercell or any form of a mesocyclone. The author argues that a lake breeze circulation created a misocyclone in the region, which was elongated vertically by a rapidly deepening convective thunderstorm in the region, producing the tornado.

Tornadoes are violently rotating columns of air extending from thunder storms to the ground. While extensive studies have been conducted to assess wind loads and flow structures around building models in strong winds, most of the previous investigations were conducted with straight-line winds. Bienkiewicz and Dudhia (1993) found that the wind loads acting on building models in tornado-like wind...

A database of tornado fatalities, nontornadic convective wind fatalities, severe thunderstorm warnings, and tornado warnings was compiled for the period 1986–2007 to assess the spatial and temporal distribution of warned and unwarned fatalities. The time of fatality and location as reported in StormDatawas compared to tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings to determine if a warning was in eff...