Assessing a Tornado Climatology from Global Tornado Intensity Distributions

Recent work demonstrated that the shape of tornado intensity distributions from various regions worldwide is well described by Weibull functions. This statistical modeling revealed a strong correlation between the fit parameterscfor shape andbfor scale regardless of the data source. In the present w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of climate 2005-02, Vol.18 (4), p.585-596
Main Authors: Feuerstein, Bernold, Dotzek, Nikolai, Grieser, Jürgen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate
Climatic zones
Climatology
Comparative studies
Correlations
Data analysis
Datasets
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
External geophysics
Meteorology
Meteors
Probability distribution
Risk assessment
Statistical methods
Statistical models
Storm damage
Storms
Storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms
Tornadoes
Wind velocity
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Summary:Recent work demonstrated that the shape of tornado intensity distributions from various regions worldwide is well described by Weibull functions. This statistical modeling revealed a strong correlation between the fit parameterscfor shape andbfor scale regardless of the data source. In the present work it is shown that the quality of the Weibull fits is optimized if only tornado reports of F1 and higher intensity are used and that thec–bcorrelation does indeed reflect a universal feature of the observed tornado intensity distributions. For regions with likely supercell tornado dominance, this feature is the number ratio of F4 to F3 tornado reportsR(F4/F3) = 0.238. Thec–bdiagram for the Weibull shape and scale parameters is used as a climatological chart, which allows different types of tornado climatology to be distinguished, presumably arising from supercell versus nonsupercell tornadogenesis. Assuming temporal invariance of the climatology and using a detection efficiency function for tornado observations, a stationary climatological probability distribution from large tornado records (U.S. decadal data 1950–99) is extracted. This can be used for risk assessment, comparative studies on tornado intensity distributions worldwide, and estimates of the degree of underreporting for areas with poor databases. For the 1990s U.S. data, a likely tornado underreporting of the weak events (F0, F1) by a factor of 2 can be diagnosed, as well as asymptotic climatologicalc,bvalues ofc= 1.79 andb= 2.13, to which a convergence in the 1950–99 U.S. decadal data is verified.
ISSN:0894-8755
1520-0442
DOI:10.1175/JCLI-3285.1