Despite accurate forecasts and timely warnings, Friday night’s tornado outbreak was December’s deadliest on record. Researchers of many stripes, from engineers and forecasters to social scientists, now face the burning question: why?
, found that the average respondent in the Paducah area scored higher than 60 percent of the national average on a basic test of what tornado watches and warnings denote. That performance placed the area in the top five among more than 100 Weather Service areas.Even with knowledge at hand, people are often constrained when a tornado approaches simply by their current location.
In both the Amazon warehouse in Illinois and the Mayfield, Ky., candle factory, where many people died, there were reportedly designated tornado shelters or shelter areas accessed by a number of employees. Yet multiple people still perished at those workplaces. That’s not a complete shock, given the obvious destruction, but it’s still a gnawing challenge for those who study tornado response.
“We’re often thinking about trying to reach individuals who have control of their settings,” said Kim Klockow-McClain, a meteorologist and social science researcher at the University of Oklahoma and the National Severe Storms Laboratory. “We think of them at home. That’s a static view of vulnerability.”“When people go to work or to a business, it’s situational vulnerability — the situation you find yourself in when a tornado occurs.
Klockow-McClain is part of a multi-institutional study of how businesses approach the severe weather threat when armed with the kind of probabilistic tornado warnings now being developed by the Weather Service. According to the authors, it’s the first time research on the new warning paradigm has been extended from the residential to the commercial setting.
“From a science standpoint, this presents an opportunity to learn and improve survivability with future events,” Strader wrote. “The coming months will reveal details [on the outbreak] stretching from meteorology to climate change to engineering to emergency management. Time will tell.”
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