Joplin, a city in the southwest corner of Missouri, United States, suffered an EF-5 tornado in the late afternoon of 22 May 2011. This event, which claimed the lives of 162 people, represents the deadliest single tornado to strike the US since modern record-keeping began in 1950. This study examines the factors associated with responses to tornado warnings. Based on a post-tornado survey of sur...

BACKGROUND Infections following a natural disaster such as an EF-5 tornado can be atypical and difficult to treat. Studies have looked at illness following several natural disasters, but few have studied respiratory illness following a tornado. MATERIALS AND METHODS A review of patients with pneumonia admitted during the period from May 22, 2009, through May 21, 2012, was completed. The Torna...

Tornado frequency may increase as the factors that contribute to severe convection are altered by a changing climate. Attributing changes in tornado frequency to observed global climate change is complicated because observational effort has increased over time, but studies of the seasonal distribution of tornado activity may avoid sampling biases. We demonstrate that peak tornado activity has s...

[1] Monthly U.S. tornado numbers are here related to observation-based monthly averaged atmospheric parameters. Poisson regression is used to form an index which captures the climatological spatial distribution and seasonal variation of tornado occurrence, as well as year-to-year variability, and provides a framework for extended range forecasts of tornado activity. Computing the same index wit...

Destruction and fatalities from recent tornado outbreaks in North America have raised considerable concerns regarding their climatic and geographic variability. However, regional characterization of tornado activity in relation to large-scale climatic processes remains highly uncertain. Here, a novel Bayesian hierarchical framework is developed for elucidating the spatiotemporal variability of ...

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...