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...

Tornadoes represent a unique natural hazard because of the very low probability of occurrence, short warning times (on the order of only a fewminutes), and the intense and destructive forces imposed on engineered and nonengineered buildings. The very low-probability/very high-consequence nature of a tornado strike makes designing for survival and reducing damage under typical financial constrai...

Peer-to-peer storage networks aim at aggregating the unused storage in today’s resource-abundant computers to form a large, shared storage space. To lay over the extremely variant machines, networks and administrative organizations, peer-topeer storage networks must be aware of the capabilities of the constituent components to leverage their resources, performance and reliability. This paper re...

On 1 March 1997, powerful tornadoes touched down in Arkansas (USA) on a Saturday afternoon. Twenty-six fatalities and 400 non-fatal injuries were reported. We performed a population-based cross-sectional study to determine factors associated with appropriate responses to tornado warnings. Of 146 survey participants, 140 (96 per cent) knew the difference between 'tornado watch' and 'tornado warn...

Tornadoes are known to evolve from a variety of different parent storm types, including supercells, squall lines, and other convective systems. Trapp et al. (2004; hereafter, TTGB04) classified reported tornadoes in the United States from 1998–2000 by parent storm type: cell, quasi-linear convective system (QLCS), or other. It was found that tornadoes from QLCSs, such as squall lines or bow ech...