Tornado Days

Here are some potential problem cases:. As chasers, we tend to be less concerned about tornado strength or counts, and more about how many minutes of tornado action we can get within a given radius from a certain location. That idea is going to play a central role in this method.

The distribution and density of tornado minutes matters. My method starts by taking an input of tornado segments and separating each segment into discrete points, with each point representing a position where a tornado has existed for one minute.

This setup would separate that tornado into 60 points spaced equidistant between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Each point represents the interpolated position of the tornado at 5: Those points that do not fall within a cluster are labeled as outliers or noise. DBSCAN is primarily designed for spatial data, but it can be tweaked to incorporate geospatial-temporal data.

Here are some examples of this in action in the context of tornado-minute points.

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From there, it is straightforward to assert that a tornado day is one where there is at least one cluster found from all the points obtained from tornadoes on that day. So three minute tornadoes in a cluster would yield a cluster size of 30 minutes.

As of this writing, the Stom Prediction Center SPC database does not contain tornado end times, and some are missing end coordinates as well. The Storm Events database does contain the relevant information, but only back to Thus, the clusterable dataset of tornadoes only goes back 22 years. Nevertheless, this sample size is sufficient for purposes here.

A tornado day is any day which has a tornado in the United States, whether one or All of them were in June, and all were squeezed into the period bounded by the 4th and the 27th. When it comes to years that missed just once on any calendar day throughout the 20 years, the range opens, covering May 23 through July When rounded to the nearest full digit, both May and July came in with 84 percent of days containing at least one touchdown of a tornado. At the other end of the scale, December failed to crack 20 percent of days having a tornado, and January just barely did so.

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The graph of the whole year, by month, is a pretty standard curve, though the increase in tornadoes in the spring is quicker than the fall off into the winter. Examinations of earlier periods and significant tornadoes showed a quicker drop-off in the summer than this sample of all tornadoes, and that will be addressed in more depth here at some point in the near future. Comparison of tornado days by calendar date from and Image rotates every 6 seconds. The former had 1, tornado days while the latter had 1, When it comes to tornado days by year, there is an overall sense of consistency, if also an observed trend slightly downward over time during the period.

The ten-year average for was tornado days per year, and it was days for , with an overall year average of days. If other please describe.

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