This paper advances a growing body of mobile mapping work which captures building scale tornado damage in order to reveal vulnerabilities, or protections, within an otherwise apparently homogenous damage path. The hope is to find how micro geography, or built environment structure patterning might lead to policy advances with regards to rebuilding of critical infrastructure in tornado prone are...

The uncertainty management problem is one of the key issues associated with moving objects (MOs). Minimizing the uncertainty region size can increase both query accuracy and system performance. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty model called the Truncated Tornado model as a significant advance in minimizing uncertainty region sizes. The Truncated Tornado model removes uncertainty region s...

Tornadoes represent one of nature's most hazardous phenomena that have been responsible for significant destruction and devastating fatalities. Here we present a Bayesian modelling approach for elucidating the spatiotemporal patterns of tornado activity in North America. Our analysis shows a significant increase in the Canadian Prairies and the Northern Great Plains during the summer, indicatin...

An enormous solar tornado was observed by SDO/AIA on 25 September 2011. It was mainly associated with a quiescent prominence with an overlying coronal cavity. We investigate the triggering mechanism of the solar tornado by using the data from two instruments: SDO/AIA and STEREO-A/EUVI, covering the Sun from two directions. The tornado appeared near to the active region NOAA 11303 that produced ...

Tornado reports are locally rare, often clustered, and of variable quality making it difficult to use them directly to describe regional tornado climatology. Here a statistical model is demonstrated that overcomes some of these difficulties and produces a smoothed regional-scale climatology of tornado occurrences. The model is applied to data aggregated at the level of counties. These data incl...

On May 3, 1999, powerful tornadoes, including a category F5 tornado, swept through Oklahoma. The authors examined all tornado-related deaths, hospital admissions, and emergency department visits to identify important risk factors. Data on deaths and injuries directly related to the tornadoes and information obtained from a survey of residents in the damage path of the F5 tornado were used in a ...

Ground beetle assemblages were studied during 2003-08 in the Pisz Forest by comparing stands disturbed by a tornado to undisturbed control stands. The following exploratory questions were put forward. (1) How do the carabid assemblages change during six years following the tornado impact? (2) Does the carabid assemblage recovery begin during the six first post-tornado years? To assess the state...

With the upgrade of the National Weather Service network of weather radars to dual-polarization, it has become possible to use the new radar moments to detect tornado debris. This study investigates the likelihood of observing the tornado debris signature (TDS) at different geographic locations throughout the United States given that an ongoing tornado is present. The likelihood of observing a ...

Tornadoes are one of nature’s most destructive forces, creating winds that can exceed 300 miles per hour. The sheer destructive power of the strongest class of tornado (EF5) makes these tornadoes the subject of active research. However, very little is currently known about why some supercells produce long-track (a long damage path) EF5 tornadoes, while other storms in similar environments produ...

Outdoor emergency sirens are used as a major component of the Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Alert and Notification System in tornado-prone Alabama and many other areas of the U.S. This study examines public perceptions and reactions to the sirens for notification of tornadoes as well as perceptions of the usefulness of alternative means of notification. In April 2011 a major tornado s...