Citation

Schroder Z, Elsner JB. Weather Clim. Soc. 2021; 13(3): 473-485.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, American Meteorological Society)

DOI

10.1175/WCAS-D-20-0130.1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Environmental variables are routinely used in estimating when and where tornadoes are likely to occur, but more work is needed to understand how tornado and casualty counts of severe weather outbreak vary with the larger-scale environmental factors. Here the authors demonstrate a method to quantify "outbreak"-level tornado and casualty counts with respect to variations in large-scale environmental factors. They do this by fitting negative binomial regression models to cluster-level environmental data to estimate the number of tornadoes and the number of casualties on days with at least 10 tornadoes.

RESULTS show that a 1000 J kg−1 increase in CAPE corresponds to a 5% increase in the number of tornadoes and a 28% increase in the number of casualties, conditional on at least 10 tornadoes and holding the other variables constant. Further, results show that a 10 m s−1 increase in deep-layer bulk shear corresponds to a 13% increase in tornadoes and a 98% increase in casualties, conditional on at least 10 tornadoes and holding the other variables constant. The casualty-count model quantifies the decline in the number of casualties per year and indicates that outbreaks have a larger impact in the Southeast than elsewhere after controlling for population and geographic area.

© 2021 American Meteorological Society

Language: en