Tornado Warnings

Dense networks of small radars-unlike today's large installations-can defeat Earth curvature blockage, thus providing more low-altitude data and meeting the diverse needs of end users. ong-range microwave radar networks are an important part of the weather forecasting and warning infrastructure used by many nations today. The observing capabilities of these networks have improved considerably over the past 60 years as new technologies-such as coherent high-power transmitters, solid-state electronics, Doppler and dual-polarization signal processing, open software architecture, and improved data dissemination and display technologies-have been developed and incorporated into the system design. Taking the U.S. weather radar network as an example, it is generally agreed that the improved performance and coverage of the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler [WSR-88D; Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD)] system, relative to the predecessor WSR-57 and WSR-74 systems, has led to significant improvement in the short-range forecasting and warning of severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and f lash f loods National Research Council 1995). Despite significant capability and continual improvement, one fundamental limitation of today's weather radar networks-all of which are composed of widely spaced radars-is the

On May 22, 2011, an EF-5 tornado spanning three-quarters of a mile in width and tracking through nearly the entire west-east extent of Joplin, Missouri, entered the records as one of the deadliest and costliest events in United States history. Building permit data was used from May 23, 2011-December 31, 2020, to examine recovery progress based on roof repair building permits (permit for roof repair only), residential and commercial building permits, and demolition permits. Each of the four permit types was plotted on the four Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) damage zones, catastrophic, extensive, moderate, and limited, by census block to determine what percentage of total permits were issued in each. Further, data on three permit types (commercial excluded) were plotted in the following combinations: (a) roof repair permits with demolition permits and (b) roof repair permits with residential building permits, plotted on the catastrophic and limited zones only. The goal of the second set of plots was to visualize the 2011 damage path using permit data. Mapping data such as these may help recovery planning through a robust understanding of the relationship between damage and permit issuance as a community enters the restoration phase of the Kates recovery model.

at Boulder, which supported this research. We also thank the members of the survey team, James Wells, Brandon Haddock and Tom Davis, for their hard work in collecting the data used in this research. We are grateful to Keith Stammer, Joplin Emergency Operations Center Director, for granting us an interview, as well as arranging for the mapping division to get us the very useful GIS data on the tornado path as well as warning siren locations. Finally, thank you to the generous residents of Joplin, and those who were more than willing to take the time to complete our survey and aid us in completing this important research.

Very wide range of technological sophistication Address issues regarding the perspectives, needs, and problems confronted by emergency management organizations frequently involved in accessing weather information, radar support, emergency warning information, organizational limitations, and so on. Geographical Distribution of In-depth interviews Conducted with the End-User Community Public Response People do not always respond appropriately to weather information and warnings: "But a tornado warning you probably got about 30% [individuals] that if they see it coming their way, I mean at their house, they may do something. The other 70% will probably go outside and look at it.

Social scientists at the Disaster Research Center (DRC) at the University of Delaware, the Center for Applied Social Research (CISA) at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, and at the University of Massachusetts are conducting a research project focusing on the knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes of end-users (primarily emergency managers and representatives from the National Weather Service-NWS) in the State of Oklahoma regarding severe weather events, warnings, and the development of new radar technology. Particular attention has also been paid to the advantages, problems, and limitations of current weather technology from the emergency manager's perspective. This research brief focuses on the end-users' recommendations regarding the allocation of the new radar resources that are being developed by the Engineering Research Center (ERC) on the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In-depth interviews were conducted with members (n=38) of the emergency management community and NWS meteorologists with diverse experiences in disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Based on the results from the in-depth interviews, we generated seven (7) broad categories that include the recommendations or factors that emergency managers reported should be taken into account in the allocation of radar resources, including a) nature of the hazard event, b) potential impact and outcomes of the hazard event, c) lead time, d) false alarm rates, e) population issues, f) infrastructure, and g) availability of other resources.

The National Academies Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHSI) has organized this session. An initial presentation by the Staff Director and the Chair of BOHSI will provide an overview of the Academies and BOHSI. Then the panel chair will present the findings of the 2017 National Academies consensus study entitled “Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise”, a collaborative effort overseen by the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Board on Human-Systems Integration. The presentation will include discussion of the critical need for integrating social and behavioral sciences into the weather enterprise. It will also include a summary of relevant research, private sector activities, current research to operations progress, data collection activities, funding support and barriers to progress. It will summarize research gaps and present a framework to sustainably use social and behavioral science research in the weather enterprise. Panelis...

, the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale replaced the traditional Fujita (F) scale. The EF scale has the same basic design as the original F scale, with six categories from 0 to 5 representing increasing degrees of damage [22]. 2 The estimated population of Joplin in 2010 was 50,175 [23].

Keywords Joplin tornado • Space-time clustering • Space-time permutation model • SaTScan™ • Building permit data • Tornado recovery U.S. average (0.4 deaths per million) (Simmons and Sutter 2012) for the same period. As of 2021, the tragedy's 10th anniversary, it still stood as the deadliest and costliest tornado event since the 1950-1951 birth of the modern U.S. tornado record (2.8 billion 2011 USD actual, 3.382 billion 2021 USD adjusted) (SPC 2021), and the fifth deadliest tornado in the colonial United States and U.S. history (1680 to 2021) (Grazulis 1993; SPC 2021). After entering the community from the west as a fairly weak EF1, the funnel grew into an EF5 wedge (estimated 200 mph, 320 kph), spanning approximately 20 city blocks north-to-south at its widest points and tracking nearly the entire west-east extent of the city (Fig. 1). It curved slightly Abstract Community recovery from a major natural hazard-related disaster can be a long process, and rebuilding likely does not occur uniformly across space and time. Spatial and temporal clustering may be evident in certain data types that can be used to frame the progress of recovery following a disaster. Publically available building permit data from the city of Joplin, Missouri, were gathered for four permit types, including residential, commercial, roof repair, and demolition. The data were used to (1) compare the observed versus expected frequency (chi-square) of permit issuance before and after the EF5 2011 tornado; (2), determine if significant space-time clusters of permits existed using the SaTScan™ cluster analysis program (version 9.7); and (3) fit any emergent cluster data to the widely-cited Kates 10-year recovery model. All permit types showed significant increases in issuance for at least 5 years following the event, and one (residential) showed significance for nine of the 10 years. The cluster analysis revealed a total of 16 significant clusters across the 2011 damage area. The results of fitting the significant cluster data to the Kates model revealed that those data closely followed the model, with some variation in the residential permit data path.

When hazardous weather is forecast, communicating probabilistic information (PI) can improves trust, confidence, and understanding of forecast information resulting in improved decision-making by emergency managers and public audiences. With probabilistic forecast tools modernizing forecast operations, the National Weather Service is calling on regional offices to increase the use of PI. However, communicating PI can be challenging since the information is intrinsically more complex than single-value deterministic forecasts that do not include a measure of uncertainty. We suggest that effective PI visualization not only includes the PI graphic but also communicates potential impacts and issues preventative guidance to limit exposure to weather-related hazards. Decision support tools like PI benefit from, if not require, effective visual communication that capitalizes on the efficiency of the visual system to extract information, decrease the time to interpret information, and increa...

The sequence of wind loading and ensuing damage to structures during the passage of a tornado is largely unknown, with most investigations focusing on the post-storm damage state. This study focuses on the 2019 EF4 Beauregard and 2020 EF3/EF4 Nashville/Cookeville tornados and integrates survivor stories, numerical tornado wind speed models, and directional damage patterns to reconstruct the sequence of events in these tornadoes for specific structures. This method of integrating multiple sources will allow for a more detailed understanding of what exactly occurs during a tornado, and it will provide improved guidance on sheltering locations to increase the occupant survivability.

Tornadoes are the most violent of all atmospheric storms. In a typical year, the United States experiences hundreds of tornadoes with associated damages on the order of one billion dollars. Community preparation and resilience would benefit from accurate predictions of these economic losses, particularly as populations in tornado-prone areas increase in density and extent. Here, we use a zero-inflated modeling approach and artificial neural networks to predict tornado-induced property damage using publicly available data. We developed a neural network that predicts whether a tornado will cause property damage (out-of-sample accuracy = 0.821 and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, AUROC, = 0.872). Conditional on a tornado causing damage, another neural network predicts the amount of damage (out-of-sample mean squared error = 0.0918 and R 2 = 0.432). When used together, these two models function as a zero-inflated log-normal regression with hidden layers. From the best-performing models, we provide static and interactive gridded maps of monthly predicted probabilities of damage and property damages for the year 2019. Two primary weaknesses include (1) model fitting requires log-scale data which leads to large natural-scale residuals and (2) beginning tornado coordinates were utilized rather than tornado paths. Ultimately, this is the first known study to directly model tornado-induced property damages, and all data, code, and tools are publicly available. The predictive capacity of this model along with an interactive interface may provide an opportunity for science-informed tornado disaster planning.

When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues a tornado warning, the alert is rapidly and widely disseminated to individuals in the general area of the warning. Historically, the assumption has been that a false-negative warning perception (i.e., when someone located within a warning polygon does not believe they have received a tornado warning) carries a higher cost than a false-positive warning perception (i.e., when someone located outside the warning area believes they have received a warning). While many studies investigate tornado warning false alarms (i.e., when the NWS issues a tornado warning, but a tornado does not actually occur), less work focuses on studying individuals outside of the warning polygon bounds who believe they received a warning (i.e., false-positive perceptions). This work attempts to quantify the occurrence of false-positive perceptions and possible factors associated with the rate of occurrence. Following two separate storm events, Oklahomans were asked whether they perceived a tornado warning. Their geolocated responses were then compared to issued warning polygons. Individuals closer to tornado warnings or within a different type of warning (e.g., a severe thunderstorm warning) are more likely to report a false-positive perception than those farther away or outside of other hazard warnings. Further work is needed to understand the rate of false-positive perceptions across different hazards and how this may influence warning response and trust in the National Weather Service.

Effective risk communication in the weather enterprise requires deep knowledge about the communities that enterprise members serve. This includes knowledge of the atmospheric and climate conditions in these communities as well as knowledge about the characteristics of the people living in these communities. Enterprise members often have access to data that facilitate the first type of knowledge, but relatively little social or behavioral data on the populations they serve. This article introduces an effort to overcome these challenges by developing a database of community statistics and an interactive platform that provides dynamic access to the database. Specific emphasis is given to one set of statistics in the community database: estimates of tornado warning reception, comprehension, and response by county warning area in the contiguous United States. Exploration of these estimates indicates significant variation in reception and comprehension across communities. This variation b...

On average, about a thousand tornadoes hit the United States every year. Three out of every four tornadoes in the world, occur in the United States. They damage life and property in their path and they often hit with very little, sometimes no warning. Tornadoes cause approximately 70 fatalities and 1,500 injuries in US every year. The interest of this study is to find whether the fatalities and injuries caused by the tornadoes based on the weekday, magnitude are significantly different among the different levels. The idea behind this paper is to find patterns in the damages dealt by the tornadoes and find an insight whether the safety measures are applied correctly.

When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues a tornado warning, the alert is rapidly and widely disseminated to individuals in the general area of the warning. Historically, the assumption has been that a false-negative warning perception (i.e., when someone located within a warning polygon does not believe they have received a tornado warning) carries a higher cost than a false-positive warning perception (i.e., when someone located outside the warning area believes they have received a warning). While many studies investigate tornado warning false alarms (i.e., when the NWS issues a tornado warning, but a tornado does not actually occur), less work focuses on studying individuals outside of the warning polygon bounds who believe they received a warning (i.e., false-positive perceptions). This work attempts to quantify the occurrence of false-positive perceptions and possible factors associated with the rate of occurrence. Following two separate storm events, Oklahomans were asked whether they perceived a tornado warning. Their geolocated responses were then compared to issued warning polygons. Individuals closer to tornado warnings or within a different type of warning (e.g., a severe thunderstorm warning) are more likely to report a false-positive perception than those farther away or outside of other hazard warnings. Further work is needed to understand the rate of false-positive perceptions across different hazards and how this may influence warning response and trust in the National Weather Service.

Effective risk communication in the weather enterprise requires deep knowledge about the communities that enterprise members serve. This includes knowledge of the atmospheric and climate conditions in these communities as well as knowledge about the characteristics of the people living in these communities. Enterprise members often have access to data that facilitate the first type of knowledge, but relatively little social or behavioral data on the populations they serve. This article introduces an effort to overcome these challenges by developing a database of community statistics and an interactive platform that provides dynamic access to the database. Specific emphasis is given to one set of statistics in the community database: estimates of tornado warning reception, comprehension, and response by county warning area in the contiguous United States. Exploration of these estimates indicates significant variation in reception and comprehension across communities. This variation b...

End-User Team Objectives  Incorporate end-user needs into the system design from day one  Identify users' perceptions:  Advantages & limitations of current weather observation and warning systems  We must actively engage end-users in identifying their risks, disaster planning and management, development of technology, and the communication process  We must respond to the needs, interests, and the limitations that end-users confront, if we are to achieve the desired outcome:

The following research brief uses data obtained from twenty six (n=26) interviews with emergency managers, National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters, and amateur radio operators (HAM) to determine whether rainfall estimation or tornado detection would more effectively address the needs of the emergency management community in Oklahoma. This study was conducted as part of a broader project on end-user integration, which intends to incorporate the needs and recommendations of end users into the design of radar technology currently under development by the Engineering Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA). In the course of our analysis, we discovered that a majority of emergency managers require tornado detection due to the specific needs of Oklahoma communities, as well as their experiences with severe weather. We identified three reasons for this decision. First, tornados are less predictable than floods. Second, mitigation strategies, such as rain gauges and retention ponds, have significantly reduced the threat of flooding in most regions. Finally, failed tornado warnings vis-à-vis flood warnings seem to pose a greater threat to professional credibility and legitimacy. Overall, these findings indicate that emergency managers consider a wide range of factors when making decisions related to severe weather. While much is revealed about the decision-making process, the reasons for which emergency managers chose tornado detection over rainfall estimation were, in some cases, based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Most strikingly, for example, is that according to epidemiological statistics, flooding appears to be a greater threat to life than tornados. Moreover, current flood mitigation practices do not address the fact that a) floods produce long-term and diffuse effects (e.g., insurance costs), and b) mitigation techniques may decrease the level of individual preparedness, putting a population at risk of flash and/or major flooding. It is the recommendation of emergency managers that radar resources should primarily be allocated to tornado detection. It should, however, be remembered that flooding may continue to constitute a major threat to these communities.

Early flood warnings are important to allow sufficient time for evacuation. Although warning systems are now in place, key questions remain as to their effectiveness in sending information to the public, which may in part depend on the media used. This paper assesses the effectiveness of warnings disseminated to the public for the December 2014 Kelantan Flood, Malaysia. The flood was the worst in decades making it an appropriate case study with which to assess public awareness and perceptions associated with flood warnings and their dissemination. The effectiveness of warnings issued via different media was assessed by questionnaire. Results show that 56% of respondents received warnings prior to the flood, a majority of them through television and information shared among the public. While the preferred medium of warning is not dependent on age, assessment of peoples' response to warnings shows that with increasing age responsiveness to orders and readiness to evacuate decreases. To increase the number of people receiving the warnings, short message service (SMS) communications sent from the authorities to a wider audience may be considered, as information shared among the public is observed to be most effective in reaching the greatest number of people.

In the spring of 2012, the United States' National Weather Service implemented new impact based tornado warnings (IBWs) that include information about predicted storm impacts to improve the likelihood of one taking protective action. In addition to including more extreme language, IBWs for especially intense tornadoes include threat tags labeling the impact as "considerable" or "catastrophic." Research by the author Casteel (2016) [3] showed that, when compared to non-IBWs, IBWs for low intensity tornadoes produced higher intentions of sheltering in place. The research reported here builds upon that earlier work. In four experiments, IBWs for stronger tornadoes are compared to those for weaker tornadoes, to assess whether the severe language used in the higher impact IBWs motivates higher sheltering intentions. Participants adopted the role of a plant manager tasked with keeping employees safe and read IBWs containing differing impact and severity language. At three decision points, the participants stated their likelihood of having employees shelter in place. In three of four experiments, the results show that any warning containing impact language stronger than a low intensity IBW, regardless of the presence of threat tags or extreme language, produced higher sheltering intentions. Additionally, sheltering decisions to "considerable" or "catastrophic" warnings did not differ in two experiments involving adult samples. These results suggest that the heightened risk transmitted by the stronger impact statements does communicate increased risk and that extreme language is not necessary to craft an effective tornado warning.

On 22 May 2011, a massive tornado tore through a densely populated section of Joplin, Missouri, killing 162 people. The EF5 tornado was the deadliest single tornado to occur in the United States since modern record keeping began in 1950, surpassing the tornado of 8 June 1953, which claimed 116 lives in Flint, Michigan. The Joplin tornado death toll was also far higher than the average annual number of deaths caused by tornadoes in the United States between 2000 and 2011. This study analyzed Joplin deaths by damage zone and place of death. Tabular data collected primarily from secondary sources revealed the number of deaths and death rates differ significantly by zone of destruction. The central zone (labeled as “catastrophic”) had the most deaths, with the number decreasing systematically in both directions from the center of that zone. The results of this study further show that more people died in nonresidential buildings in Joplin than is usual in a U.S. tornado event, calling in...

On the evening of 22 May 2011, an EF-5 tornado tore a path six miles long across Joplin, Missouri, USA, killing 162 people as it passed through the heart of the city. This tornado stands as the deadliest single tornado to hit the United States since modern recordkeeping began in 1950, surpassing the tornado of 8 June 1953 that claimed 116 lives in Flint, Michigan. The record number of deaths caused by the single tornado in Joplin was far higher than the average annual number of US tornado deaths over the last three decades. This study explores the reasons for the high number of fatalities caused by the 2011 Joplin tornado. Questionnaire surveys administered among tornado survivors and informal discussions with emergency management personnel and others suggest that five reasons are associated with the high number of tornado fatalities experienced in Joplin: (1) the sheer magnitude of this event; (2) its path through commercial and densely populated residential areas; (3) the relatively large size of damage area; (4) the physical characteristics of affected homes in Joplin; and (5) the fact that some residents ignored tornado warnings. Several recommendations are offered, the implementation of which should reduce future tornado fatalities not only in Joplin, but elsewhere in the United States.

Background: Investigating the extreme weather patterns (EWP) in Arkansas can help policy makers and the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management in establishing polices and making informed decisions regarding hazard mitigation. Previous studies have posed a question whether local topography and landcover control EWP in Arkansas. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to characterize factors influencing EWP in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and provide a statistically justifiable means for improving building codes and establishing public storm shelters in disaster-prone areas in the State of Arkansas. The extreme weather events including tornadoes, derechos, and hail that have occurred during 1955-2015 are considered in this study. Results: Our GIS-based regression analysis provides statistically robust indications that explanatory variables (elevation, topographic protection, landcover, time of day, month, and mobile homes) strongly influence EWP in Arkansas, with the caveat that hazardous weather frequency is congruent to magnitude. Conclusions: Results indicate a crucial need for raising standards of building codes in high severity regions in Arkansas. Topography and landcover are directly influencing EWP, consequently they make future events a question of "when" not "where" they will reoccur.

Tornadoes are a dangerous threat to public safety. The National Weather Service (NWS), therefore, advises the public to go to an interior room on the lowest level of their houses when a tornado warning is issued for their area. As the NWS Central Region Service Assessment of the Joplin, Missouri Tornado published in July 2011 reveals, however, this is often not the first action taken after learning that there is danger of being hit by a tornado. Rather, people need to seek confirmation from more than one source before following the recommended action. The goal of this research project is to determine how the number of sources residents use vary with respect to characteristics such as the gravity of their past experiences. A total of 20 residents from two small Nebraskan towns, Pilger and Saint Helena, were interviewed. Residents were first asked to share their current sources of weather information and how they would respond to a given situation at the present time. Next, they were ...

Since the successful tornado forecast at Tinker AFB in 1948 paved the way for the issuance of tornado warnings, the science of tornado detection and forecasting has advanced greatly. However, tornado warnings must be disseminated to the public to be of any use. The Texas tornado warning conferences in 1953 began to develop the framework for a modern tornado warning system and included radar detection of tornadoes, a spotter network, and improved communications between the U.S. Weather Bureau, spotters, and public officials, allowing more timely warnings and dissemination of those warnings to the public. Commercial radio and television are a main source of warnings for many, and the delivery methods on TV have changed much since 1960. NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) was launched after the 1974 Super Outbreak of tornadoes, with the most important feature being the tone alert that allowed receivers to alert people even when the radio broadcast was turned off. Today, NWR reaches most of the U....

The study reported here explores how to enhance the public value of hurricane forecast and warning information by examining the entire warning process. A mental models research approach is applied to address three risk management tasks critical to warnings for extreme weather events: 1) understanding the risk decision and action context for hurricane warnings, 2) understanding the

The National Academies Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHSI) has organized this session. An initial presentation by the Staff Director and the Chair of BOHSI will provide an overview of the Academies and BOHSI. Then the panel chair will present the findings of the 2017 National Academies consensus study entitled "Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise", a collaborative effort overseen by the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Board on Human-Systems Integration. The presentation will include discussion of the critical need for integrating social and behavioral sciences into the weather enterprise. It will also include a summary of relevant research, private sector activities, current research to operations progress, data collection activities, funding support and barriers to progress. It will summarize research gaps and present a framework to sustainably use social and behavioral science research in the weather enterprise. Panelists will address issues related to future opportunities for human factors researchers and practitioners and will engage the audience in a discussion of these issues.

Perceptions of Emergency Preparedness Among Immigrant Hispanics Living in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by Rebekah Ann Doyle MS, Arkansas Tech University, 2011 BSN, Northeastern State University, 2008 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Public Health Walden University November 2016 Abstract Tornadoes are occurring with increased frequency in Oklahoma. Emergency preparedness planning is essential to decreasing individuals’ risks of injury or death from a tornado. Research on immigrant Hispanics’ knowledge and perceptions of emergency preparedness is limited. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and lived experiences of immigrant Hispanics who had experienced a tornado or other crisis weather conditions in Oklahoma during spring of 2013. The research questions explored their perceived risk for injury and knowledge of tornado preparedness planning. The health belief model provided the theoretical underpi...

One of the goals of the Warning Project is to understand how people receive warnings of hazardous weather and subsequently use this information to make decisions. As part of the project, 519 surveys from Austin, Texas, floodplain residents were collected and analyzed. About 90% of respondents understood that a tornado warning represented a more serious and more likely threat than a tornado watch. Most respondents (86%) were not concerned about a limited number of false alarms or close calls reducing their confidence in future warnings, suggesting no cry-wolf effect. Most respondents reported safe decisions in two hypothetical scenarios: a tornado warning issued while the respondent was home and a tornado visible by the respondent while driving. However, nearly half the respondents indicated that they would seek shelter from a tornado under a highway overpass if they were driving. Despite the limitations of this study, these results suggest that more education is needed on the danger...

With increasing concerns over the possibility of tornadoes in highly populated areas in Canada, emergency managers are looking into ways to mitigate the impacts of tornadoes. Given that tornadoes can cause enormous destruction, early warnings and proper evacuation actions are critically important in helping save lives. In this paper, a survey was conducted to analyse the evacuation behaviour of households and drivers during a hypothetical tornado warning situation in the city of Calgary, Alberta. Nearly 500 Calgarians took part in the online survey and provided information on how they would respond to tornado warnings after receiving them. This paper presents the results of the survey. Using probit models, the factors influencing these evacuation decisions are identified and discussed in detail. The results of the household evacuation model show the importance of improving awareness about the safest locations during a tornado. It further highlights the need for targeting the population under the age of 30, who are more likely to take unsafe evacuation actions. The model for evacuation of drivers shows that several factors, such as knowing the difference between a watch and a warning, awareness of safe cover, receipt of warnings through natural environmental cues and the level of education, trigger evacuation actions in avoiding a tornado threat.

This paper uses the “Super Outbreak” of 2011 as a case study to examine the potential gaps between the dissemination of severe weather warnings and the public’s behavioral response to this information. This study focuses on a single tornado track that passed through Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The tornado caused massive damage and destruction and led to a total of 62 fatalities. The threat of severe storms was known days in advance, and forecasts were disseminated to the public. Questions were raised about the forecasts, warning lead times, and the perception of the warnings among residents. This paper examines the potential gaps that exist between the dissemination of tornadic warning information and citizen response. The analysis of data collected through a mixed-method approach suggests that, regardless of weather forecast accuracy, a significant chasm exists between the dissemination of warnings and the personalizing of risks, which results in limited use of protective measures in the ...

at Boulder, which supported this research. We also thank the members of the survey team, James Wells, Brandon Haddock and Tom Davis, for their hard work in collecting the data used in this research. We are grateful to Keith Stammer, Joplin Emergency Operations Center Director, for granting us an interview, as well as arranging for the mapping division to get us the very useful GIS data on the tornado path as well as warning siren locations. Finally, thank you to the generous residents of Joplin, and those who were more than willing to take the time to complete our survey and aid us in completing this important research.

The following research brief uses data obtained from twenty six (n=26) interviews with emergency managers, National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters, and amateur radio operators (HAM) to determine whether rainfall estimation or tornado detection would more effectively address the needs of the emergency management community in Oklahoma. This study was conducted as part of a broader project on end-user integration, which intends to incorporate the needs and recommendations of end users into the design of radar technology currently under development by the Engineering Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA). In the course of our analysis, we discovered that a majority of emergency managers require tornado detection due to the specific needs of Oklahoma communities, as well as their experiences with severe weather. We identified three reasons for this decision. First, tornados are less predictable than floods. Second, mitigation strategies, such as rain g...

The Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) is developing networks of lowpower, low-cost radars that adaptively collect, process, and visualize high-resolution data in the lowest portion of the atmosphere. CASA researchers are working with emergency managers (EM) to ensure that the network concept is designed with EMs’ needs in mind. Interviews, surveys, analysis of product usage logs, and simulated scenarios are being used to solicit EM input. Results indicate the need for products for both high- and low-bandwidth end users, visualizations for velocity products that are more easily interpreted, and enhanced training. CASA researchers are developing interventions to address these needs.

Currently the National Science Foundation (NSF) is seeking proposals to communicate NSF- funded research programs to public audiences. The American public generally supports government funded scientific research. However, despite their favorable attitude, Americans are scientifically illiterate. Weather radar is one of the most important tools for both forecasting and meteorological research. It is also a useful tool for the public. It is crucial the public understands at least some of what is being accomplished in regards to weather radar research because one informed decision during a hazardous weather event may mean the difference between life and death. A proposal was written to use video and web-based material to teach the public about weather radar research, past and present. A literature review was conducted across multiple disciplines prior to constructing the proposal in order to determine the most effective way to teach the public about weather radar. In addition, a survey...

As with floods, cyclones, and storm surges, Bangladesh is also vulnerable to tornadoes. Each year this South Asian country experiences more than six tornadoes. On April 14, 2004, a severe tornado swept through 38 villages of north-central Bangladesh, destroying everything in its path, including livestock, houses, crops, trees, and businesses. The human death toll reached 111, while thousands sustained injuries. The purpose of this research project was to gain knowledge from tornado victims regarding the warning they received prior to the tornado on April 14, 2004. Face-to-face interviews with 216 respondents randomly selected for this study revealed that no tornado forecasting and warning system exists in the study area or in Bangladesh in general. All respondents strongly favored the introduction of public tornado forecasting and warning systems in the country. This study briefly outlines how these systems could be implemented.

Currently the National Science Foundation (NSF) is seeking proposals to communicate NSF- funded research programs to public audiences. The American public generally supports government funded scientific research. However, despite their favorable attitude, Americans are scientifically illiterate. Weather radar is one of the most important tools for both forecasting and meteorological research. It is also a useful tool for the public. It is crucial the public understands at least some of what is being accomplished in regards to weather radar research because one informed decision during a hazardous weather event may mean the difference between life and death. A proposal was written to use video and web-based material to teach the public about weather radar research, past and present. A literature review was conducted across multiple disciplines prior to constructing the proposal in order to determine the most effective way to teach the public about weather radar. In addition, a survey...

Early flood warnings are important to allow sufficient time for evacuation. Although warning systems are now in place, key questions remain as to their effectiveness in sending information to the public, which may in part depend on the media used. This paper assesses the effectiveness of warnings disseminated to the public for the December 2014 Kelantan Flood, Malaysia. The flood was the worst in decades making it an appropriate case study with which to assess public awareness and perceptions associated with flood warnings and their dissemination. The effectiveness of warnings issued via different media was assessed by questionnaire. Results show that 56% of respondents received warnings prior to the flood, a majority of them through television and information shared among the public. While the preferred medium of warning is not dependent on age, assessment of peoples' response to warnings shows that with increasing age responsiveness to orders and readiness to evacuate decreases. To increase the number of people receiving the warnings, short message service (SMS) communications sent from the authorities to a wider audience may be considered, as information shared among the public is observed to be most effective in reaching the greatest number of people.

The past few years have coincided with several catastrophic single and multiple outbreak tornado events. These have revealed that even with more advanced warning systems, and the availability of protective spaces such as safe rooms, a large tornado can still claim scores of lives and cause many more injuries. As a result, there is a need for more fine spatial scale research on a number of topics, including warning systems and response, evacuation, and the heterogeneity of building risk in a tornado. All of these research areas would benefit from fine-scale damage data from past events to understand contributing factors to morbidity and mortality. For example, by considering the building-to-building damage variation in previous tornado paths, patterns might be identified that can be translated to tornado-prone areas as policy actions(e.g., is the risk to life greater up or down slope, on the facing or opposite side of the street to an approaching tornado, and within or on the end of ...

Early flood warnings are important to allow sufficient time for evacuation. Although warning systems are now in place, key questions remain as to their effectiveness in sending information to the public, which may in part depend on the media used. This paper assesses the effectiveness of warnings disseminated to the public for the December 2014 Kelantan Flood, Malaysia. The flood was the worst in decades making it an appropriate case study with which to assess public awareness and perceptions associated with flood warnings and their dissemination. The effectiveness of warnings issued via different media was assessed by questionnaire. Results show that 56% of respondents received warnings prior to the flood, a majority of them through television and information shared among the public. While the preferred medium of warning is not dependent on age, assessment of peoples' response to warnings shows that with increasing age responsiveness to orders and readiness to evacuate decreases. To increase the number of people receiving the warnings, short message service (SMS) communications sent from the authorities to a wider audience may be considered, as information shared among the public is observed to be most effective in reaching the greatest number of people.