Classifying Rare Tornadic Outbreaks in the U.S.

Tornadic outbreaks cause widespread devastation mentally, physically, and financially. This project focuses on rare tornadic outbreaks by implementing climatological estimates of daily tornadic probability in the United States. The data consists of (E)F1 and greater tornado reports from 1954-2015 from the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). A Gaussian smoother was applied to each day for both space and time. Then a climatology was created by taking the mean of each day over the 62-year span. To obtain the rarity factor, each individual day was then divided by the climatology. Rarity was classified in three states; maximum rarity factor, how large an area was affected, and how intense the event was. These results show that intensity and area have a strong correlation. This topic is critical because rare events cause a state of uproar in the public and with a lack of preparedness cause lead to multiple complications.