Tornado Track Deviation in Differing Storm Environments

Current day tornado warning strategies have spatial inefficiencies owing to uncertainty in tornado paths. Quantifying the likely deviation of tornado tracks from the storm motion vector for a given storm environment may decrease false alarm ratios and communicate risk more effectively. However, prior literature on the topic was primarily constrained to singular tornadoes or outbreaks and limited in sample size due to time-consuming manual analysis of tracks. An automated approach looking at thousands of tornado tracks from the National Weather Service Data Assessment Toolkit correlated to environmental data from the Rapid Refresh model has been developed and has shown preliminary results that tornadoes in environments with high storm relative helicity tend to move with less deviance to the mean tornado path and storm motion vector.