INTRODUCTION On 21 August 2011 an F3 tornado hit the Canadian town of Goderich, Ontario, leaving 40 people injured and one dead. Specific medium-term changes in utilization of health care following a disaster have not been analyzed in medical literature. Documenting the emergency department utilization through this subacute period would be helpful to enable institutions and healthcare practitio...

Tornado is a software kernel for virtual experimentation on the basis of ODE/DAE models. Recently, a model compiler has been developed that converts flat Modelica code to executable models suitable for use with the Tornado kernel. As a result, a subset of Modelica models can now be used for tasks such as parameter estimation, scenario analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, sensitivity analysis and s...

Many studies of tornado-severe local storms outbreaks have called attention to the role of the jet stream. In fact, the jet has become an accepted part of a climatological model for tornado occurrences in the central and southern Plains. This study undertakes to verify this acceptance by statistically testing the association between 500-mb. indications of the midlatitude and subtropical jet str...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a tornado disaster on the personal preparedness of local residents to determine (1) to what extent the tornado outbreak experience had altered preparedness awareness, willingness to act, and levels of personal preparedness of residents as measured by possession of a preparedness kit; and (2) what effect this experience had on the...

Casualties from natural disasters may depend on the day of the week they strike. With data from the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS), daily variation in hurricane and tornado casualties from 5,043 tornado and 2,455 hurricane time/place events is analyzed. Hurricane forecasts provide at-risk populations with considerable lead time. Such lead time allows s...

[1] We present a novel explanation of the physical processes behind one type of cloud and ground-level tornadogenesis within a supercell. We point out that the charge separation naturally found in these large thunderstorms can potentially serve to contract the preexisting angular momentum through the additional process of the electric force. On the basis of this, we present a plausible geometry...

Dr. Stanley Changnon has done extensive work in climatological studies that included tornado frequency. He studied these frequencies using tornado statistics across Illinois using data from storms that occurred between 1916 and 1980 (Changnon, 1982). He also guided work done at the Illinois State Water Survey on the significance of long-track tornadoes (Wilson and Morgan, 1971). One of the conc...

A dataset of killer tornadoes is compiled and analyzed spatially in order to assess region-specific vulnerabilities in the United States from 1880 to 2005. Results reveal that most tornado fatalities occur in the lower–Arkansas, Tennessee, and lower–Mississippi River valleys of the southeastern United States—a region outside of traditional “tornado alley.” Analysis of variables including tornad...

The primary objective of this study was to estimate the percentage of U.S. tornadoes that are spawned annually by squall lines and bow echoes, or quasi-linear convective systems (QLCSs). This was achieved by examining radar reflectivity images for every tornado event recorded during 1998–2000 in the contiguous United States. Based on these images, the type of storm associated with each tornado ...

A wavelet-based algorithm is developed to detect tornadoes from Doppler weather radar radial-velocity observations. Within this algorithm, a relative region-to-region velocity difference (RRVD) is defined based on the scaleand location-dependent wavelet coefficients and this difference represents the relative magnitude of the radial velocity shear between two adjacent regions of different scale...