Towards a Tornado Power Climatology for Tennessee

Recent studies have suggested that large, long-track tornadoes tend to follow preferred paths that cluster around particular places. This study focuses on the geographic distribution of tornado tracks in Tennessee in order to examine potential preferred areas and tracks for the development and movement of destructive storms. I mapped tornado track data for Tennessee from 1950 to 2010 for Tennessee and the surrounding area using kernel density techniques, and applied ordinary kriging to destruction potential indices derived from F-scale or EF-scale and the approximate track area to produce a unique spatial and temporal climatology of the storms. The spatial patterns that exist for destruction potential are guided somewhat by the relatively small numbers of large tornadoes, especially in the eastern portions of the state, but the patterns are consistent with known climatologies devised by other researchers.