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Opinion: How to improve our win rate against deadly tornadoes


Along with other experts in the field, I’ve spent most of my life trying to learn more about tornadoes to make them more predictable and hopefully prevent tragedies like this one. For nearly three decades, I’ve observed 300 tornadoes with a portable Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radar, mapping their destructive winds in an effort to understand exactly how, when, and why they occur. form and why some tornadoes become monstrous with winds of up to 300 mph. My colleagues and I work to develop better equations, better computer predictive models, better ways to warn people, and better options for shelter.

Through our research, we’ve learned a lot about why tornadoes are still deadly despite our ability to predict them – and what we can do to protect them. better protect themselves from their destruction.

If a tornado isn’t forecast well and has little or no warning, that’s an obvious risk. Today, however, most major tornado outbreaks are very well predicted. A word of warning for Mayfield, Kentucky issued about 20 minutes before the tornado hit, and the storm produced tornado warnings for more than an hour.

But timing is only part of the battle. If people don’t hear or understand the warning, it can’t be effective. Alerts are announced by sirens, on television and on Twitter, but some people – and sometimes the most vulnerable – still miss out. Some elderly, poor and disabled people may be less “connected”, or less able to handle alerts. Some may not understand English. While efforts are being made to increase the coverage of warnings, there is still a long way to go. In light of this recent outbreak, we still don’t know how much of an impact the warnings will have on everyone at risk.

The days of & # 39;  let's see what happens & # 39;  end
Another problem is that tornado forecasts are often very broad, making it difficult to decipher the severity of the threat. Because about 70% Tornado warning, no tornado occurred. Worse still, even if a tornado occurs in a warning area, I’ve found in my research that typically less than 1% of the alerted area is affected. With this recent tornado event, my analysis shows that approximately 20,000 square miles across several states have received tornado warnings, including more than a million people in parts of the cities of Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis. But small tornadoes, almost always less than a mile wide, and the damage trace is narrow. Even in this unusually bad outbreak, the direct impact of the tornado seems to be felt by only a small fraction of those who are warned.

Amplifying this issue of broad tornado warnings is very nuanced. All tornadoes are not the same. Some are relatively weak, with winds of 100 mph, capable of toppling some trees and damaging roofs, while others have winds near 300 mph, flattening all but buildings. strongest house.

Since we have little ability to predict how powerful a tornado will become, warnings nearly always describe the worst outcomes. This is in stark contrast to warnings about a winter storm, where in my observations the odds are more than 50/50 that it will snow and a forecast can specify whether to expect snow. ​will be an inch or a foot. With hurricanes, communities will take different actions depending on whether a Category 1 or 5 hurricane is forecast. But with tornadoes, no such detail exists – and people can become complacent with warnings, encountering false warnings.

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Solving this over-alert problem isn’t easy. Efforts have been made years ago to reduce false alarm rates with tornado warnings, however this has resulted in shorter average lead times and even unreported tornadoes. And because the exact path of tornadoes is not known, some tornadoes can bend and “escape” into narrower, more precise warning zones and impact unprepared people. .
Even when there are many advance warnings of a tornado and people try to act, it can sometimes be difficult to find a safe place. Distinctive family home costs several thousand dollars, which may be beyond the reach of many. And those who can’t afford it often live in the weakest homes. Of course, cost is also a factor for schools and industries.

Improve our safety rate

That said, we can take measures to make these tragedies less likely.

More research will help us better understand how the most intense tornadoes form and how to forecast them better, earlier, and with more nuance. Being able to give an hour’s advance warning of a tornado and be able to tell whether it’s strong or weak would allow people to seek stronger shelter, or even evacuate the aisle in rare cases. Ordinary shelter is not enough.

To this end, tornado scientists are gearing up for the largest-ever study of tornadoes in the Southeast, called PERiLS – short for Evolution and Inner Rotation. Linear hurricanes – supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We will converge in the Southeast during the peak of tornado season in March and April 2022 and 2023, piloting multiple DOW and DOW-like radar trucks, launching hundreds of weather balloons and deploying deployed dozens of weather stations to observe tornadoes in the Southeast with more detail than ever before. The main goal of PERiLS is to understand how, when, and why these deadly tornado outbreaks happen, and how we can better forecast and communicate warnings to the public.

There is a great burden on those who issue tornado warnings to be more precise and more consistent with sounding the alarm; We are not always “better safe than sorry.” But improving forecasts and warnings will be a complex task that takes time to fine-tune.

As scientists navigate that challenge, we can do sensible things right now to try to maximize our safety. For starters, communities and industries need to improve and expand storm shelter infrastructure to make buildings more resilient to tornadoes. With ongoing research, thinking critically about how we distribute warnings and help the public better respond to those warnings when they are issued, can make fatal tornado events worse. Batch is much less common.

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