Using GIS to Generate Spatial Statistics for Tornado Occurrences

The Storm Prediction Center for a number of years has maintained a very useful database of statistics on Tornado occurrences throughout the United States. The primary limitation in the data contained is that the data is not easily accessible. The file format does not import into the most common desktop applications. A Texas Tech University's Wind Science and Engineering Center (WISE) has a history of making a variety of uses of this type of data. Various investigators from a variety of disciplines have expressed an interest in utilizing this data set. In order to make the data of utility to everyone the entire database needed to be imported into an environment where the data could be easily plotted, queried and normalized. The ability to supplement the tornado data with other data sources, was also considered a necessity.

The analysis and display platform of choice in many disciplines is tending towards the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Many data sets are already in a format that can be imported into a GIS, and immediately plotted. GIS software is also closely linked to the remote sensing software, and this capability allows the utilization of both raster and vector data. In order to form a baseline of what limitations are included in the tornado data set, some previous studies will be repeated.