On Tuesday, Patrick Marsh wanted a distraction from his dissertation and embarked on an idle investigation of tornado warnings and impacted areas (my thoughts on what “impact” means are below). Using some very rough approximations, he calculated the percentage of warned persons who are impacted by a tornado. Even under the most generous set of assumptions, the verification by population is generally below 20%. It’s worth noting that 2011 (the most recent year that official tornado data is available) was the best year in the analysis, but there is no indication of a general improvement trend.
Despite some of the problems I’ve previously noted in the polygon warning system, it’s still better than warning entire counties. Still there’s a lot of room to improve the false alarm rate. Much of the population-based false alarm comes from warnings that have no tornado at all. The rest either comes from too-large warnings or not-small-enough warnings (“not-small-enough” warnings are small enough to be justifiable, but still larger than absolutely necessary).
It’s not always easy to shrink warnings. Only the supercell storms relatively close to a radar site seem suitable. In those cases, it’s possible to make the warning only a few miles wide, or the width of the mesocyclone with uncertainty added as you go downstream. This would minimize the area under the warning, but it got me wondering: would that be too small?
At the scale of a mile or two, how do you explain the warned area to the public? Storm-based warnings are already difficult to communicate quickly, and microwarnings would only compound the problem. Even in Lafayette, the 10th largest city in Indiana, the covered area might look something like:
...TEAL ROAD BETWEEN 4TH STREET AND 26TH ST...
...KOSSUTH ST BETWEEN 9TH STREET AND SAGAMORE PARKWAY...
...SOUTH ST BETWEEN FIVE POINTS AND FARABEE DR...
...18TH ST BETWEEN BECK LN AND FERRY ST...
And so on. Or maybe it would use neighborhoods and landmarks instead:
...LAFAYETTE COUNTRY CLUB...
...HIGHLAND PARK...
...JEFFERSON HIGH SCHOOL...
...FIVE POINTS...
...WALLACE TRIANGLE...
...COLUMBIAN PARK...
Either way, it’s much more complicated than a simple “LAFAYETTE”. Yes, it’s more detailed, does that help? First, it takes much longer to read the text. Secondly, can you count on people, especially those who are new to the area, to know the streets, neighborhoods, and landmarks well enough to quickly figure out if they’re affected or not? I suspect the answer is “no”. Perhaps some day someone with the time, energy, and funding can look at this.
Sidebar: What does it mean to be “affected” by a tornado?
When Patrick commented on Twitter about his post from Tuesday, I remarked that the results depend on how “affected” is defined. His analysis was based on population, but that doesn’t necessarily convey all impacts. If my office is wiped out by a tornado but my house is untouched, I am still affected. You can expand this out even further and incorporate businesses that saw decreased revenue as a result of a tornado, even if they were not directly hit. Businesses that see increased revenue (e.g. home improvement stores) might also be included, even though the effect is a positive one. The broader (and, I would argue, more accurately) we define being affected, the more difficult it becomes to get accurate data.