Why is oklahoma a prime spot for tornadoes

With possible tornadoes three to six hours away, watches are issued that highlight portions of a state or two. Tornado warnings are issued when the threat of tornadoes is imminent. Warnings often appear tens of minutes before the tornadoes hit.

In the case of large and violent tornadoes, such warnings can be quite accurate. Weaker tornadoes sometimes may happen without warning. Research within the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Storm Prediction Center aims to improve the tornado warning process, giving more lead time to the public. Tornadoes are too small to be explicitly represented in climate models. However, research shows that in much of the USA climate change is likely to lead to increase in the frequency of severe storms, and tornadoes form as a result of severe storms.

I'm thankful that the federal government is helping Oklahoma out, but in a lot of those, we weren't overwhelmed and we could have taken and dealt with it.

And some states that may be in much worse budget shape than we are had twice as much but got no help from the federal government on like-minded events. Joseph Nimmich, FEMA associate administrator for disaster response, said Thursday that politics has absolutely nothing to do with Oklahoma's many disaster declarations: "It's purely a natural occurrence. We welcome your comments. Bell Media reviews every comment submitted, and reserves the right to approve comments and edit for brevity and clarity.

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Choose a shelter room in your house. This should be in an underground space. Perhaps this might be a bathroom or a hallway in the middle of your house. It can be quite dangerous to live in a mobile home in Oklahoma. If you do live in this kind of home, make a shelter plan in another building that you will travel to in advance.

Check the weather reports frequently throughout the day. Harold Brooks showed me a map of Oklahoma City sprinkled with multicolored tracks of all the tornadoes that had gone through the area since The whole region is littered with tornado tracks. On the map view, it looks about as beleaguered as Moore.

But then Brooks brought out one more data set. National Weather Service records go back to But both of those are likely missing a lot of smaller tornadoes and tornadoes that landed in lightly populated places. Perspective matters. In a mapmaker promoting colonization of the Oklahoma Territory claimed the area was virtually tornado free, Grazulis told me.

At the very least, it tells you what is possible. Brooks analyzed the data to find the times of the year and places in the country where tornadoes seemed to be more likely to happen. Using this, he came up with the most likely place and time for a big tornado: a town called Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, on May 2.

But when I laughed, he explained. That location comes with a caveat. Brooks presented this data at a conference on April 30, Three days later, the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado came to town.

M ichael Bewley was 11 years old in , when the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado flattened the house he shared with his mother on the outskirts of Moore. One day, they had a small, neat home on three acres at the end of a long dirt road. The next day, they had rubble. Bewley and his mother had no basement. They could have crawled into the bathtub, pulled a mattress over themselves, and hoped for the best. Instead, they ran for the car.

When they came back later that night, everything was gone. Their belongings had been crushed, thrown and rained on. But, in one sense, he did stay. Bewley still lives in Moore. Bewley has an infant daughter whom he plans to raise in Moore and who has already taken her first turns in the storm shelter. These are the realities of his life: Has it been shaped by chance, or something else? They focused on these three classes of tornado because that filters out the smaller type of tornadoes that more easily get left out of records.

By smoothing the data in this way, the researchers saw some places where larger tornadoes really do seem to be more common. Looking at it this way is looking at tornadoes on a zoomed-in scale, regional instead of national.

But it is part of a clique — a gang of cities and counties marked by the invisible target painted on their backs. Broyles and Crosbie drew a frequency map of the big tornadoes to touch down in years, showing the number of tornadoes per 1, square miles. Plotted out this way, they found clusters. There are dark blobs — tornado alleys within tornado alleys — scattered across the continent.

Moore is a part of that blob. Other places, including Fillmore County, Nebraska, and Union County, Mississippi, appear to be even more prone to big tornadoes.

That higher population density probably means more thorough reporting of tornadoes. Recently, a Severe Storms Laboratory research scientist named Corey Potvin teamed up with Brooks and Broyles to re-evaluate the mini-tornado alleys data.

They tested out some new ways of accounting for flaws in historical records and calculated the probability that these mini-alleys occurred randomly was just 3 percent. U nfortunately, this is where tornado science dusts its hands and wanders off for a beer.

Meteorology can tell us about how tornadoes form at the continental scale.