Improving Forecasting of Tornadic Development in Convective Storms

Tornadoes are one of the most powerful and lethal weather systems on Earth. The accuracy and precision in the location of tornadic development is crucial in saving lives and property. Current forecasting indices like Storm Relative Helicity and the Energy Helicity Index have limitations with their tornadic region being way too broad. In this study, a new index was designed to reduce the broadness of potential tornadic development to a more localized region for Midwest tornadoes. Within this study, the relative weighting of variables in both Storm Relative Helicity and the Energy Helicity Index were used as factors in the creation of a new index. From analysis of this study, wind shear was found to have the highest relative weighting of all variables. Better test results have been achieved by the direct application of wind shear within the new index calculation applied to our sample of storms studied. Our final analysis presents the new index with severe storms under three different scenarios which include the following: cases with no tornadoes, cases with 2-5 tornadoes, and cases with greater than 5 tornadoes.