This week we’re launching the newest version of Tornado Archive: v2.1. This newest update may not be as big as the first two, but we’re still adding a lot. Along with some small explorer changes, we focused hard on getting as many new tornadoes in more detailed tracks. Using NCEI (National Centers for Environmental Information) data, Malcolm was able to upgrade longer tracked US tornadoes. We also used DAT (Damage Assessment Toolkit) damage survey information wherever it was available. Read more about this effort here. These more detailed tracks better show what towns a tornado may have impacted between its start and end point. However, because NCEI uses county segments, shorter tracked tornadoes won’t get any improvement in their track information. Additionally, with the help of those more locally knowledgeable about foreign tornadoes, we’ve added some detailed tracks for Italy, Germany, and China.
Most of the new tornadoes we’ve added come from the US tornadoes between 1680 and 1879, and F2 tornadoes between 1880 and 1949. With these two additions, the work put in to convert Thomas P. Grazulis’s book into a database is finally complete. Approximate tracks are now available for over 7000 tornadoes that occurred before the start of the official SPC database. Accordingly, every catalogued US tornado is now in our database. We also found a couple new Chinese tornado databases. The first is between 2003 and 2019, and the next is in the form of yearly reports released since 2018. More assorted tornadoes found using newspapers have also been added in some countries. These scattered worldwide tornadoes will be added periodically, as we find sources for more locations.
Lastly, there are a few additions and changes to the explorer itself. The largest is the ability to generate animated gifs at 3 quality levels of events, which is especially useful for events which have environment data. We also made the environment contours smoother and added a loading spinner at the bottom to account for the increased load time of international tornadoes and more detailed tracks.
Version 2.1 bug fixes:
- tweaks to the tornado polygon colors
- fixed popup behavior when the underlying tornado data changes
- fixed popup links when multiple tornadoes have been clicked
- environment data location corrected (was off by < 1 grid point)
- fixed num-states searching
- fixed missing hodographs near the southern boundary of the domain
- fixed a bug where the wind barbs and hodographs didn’t rotate with the map
Current future plans
- Adding 20th century reanalysis, for environment data that goes back to 1850 (beta version of this shown below for the Irving, KS outbreak of 1879)
- Adding individual tornado pages which may include:
- Event narratives from Grazulis and NCEI
- Media for tornadoes, such as photos and videos, possibly allowing people to submit links to them.
- Sounding data
- Radar data
- Filtering by ENSO and other oscillations
- Continued addition of international tornadoes
