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...

Tornado: Maximizing Locality and Concurrency in a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Operating System Benjamin Gamsa Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1999 This dissertation presents novel operating system structuring techniques for dealing with the problems of scalability in shared-memory multiprocessors. By using an object-oriented structure, with ea...

Tornado ratings from the 1950s into the early 1970s were based almost entirely upon remote, post-event review of media articles and photographs (Schaefer and Edwards 1998). Starting in the middle 1970s, local National Weather Service (NWS) offices have assigned F-scale ratings to most tornadoes based on a blend of f irst-hand surveys by their meteorologists and anecdotal evidence from news medi...

Does charitable giving respond to new demands, and if so, does the response come at the expense of other charitable causes? To answer these questions we exploit exogenous variation in need arising from the random event of a nearby tornado. We use location fixed effects estimators and examine changes in charitable donations claimed for tax deductions in IRS data on individual income taxes by geo...

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...

Once identified, these tornado clusters are analyzed, both in terms of a long-term climatology (1950-2009) using the Storm Data tornado database, and in terms of a shorter period (20032009). The latter corresponds to the time period of the SPC storm environment database, which includes an hourly archive of objectively analyzed convective parameters such as CAPE, bulk shear, storm-relative helic...

The 8 May 2003 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, tornadic supercell is predicted with the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS)model using four nested grids with 9-km, 1-km, 100-m, and 50-m grid spacings. The Oklahoma City Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) radial velocity and reflectivity data are assimilated through the ARPS three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) a...