Here comes version 2.2! This update comes with a few additions, most notably that we now have the 2022 data for the United States up on the site. 2022’s data is as high quality as the last couple years, meaning damage paths and high resolution tracks. Unfortunately, we haven’t had time to get any international data for 2022 compiled but we definitely plan to.
Tornadoes of the far past
In addition, we have made a few changes to the explorer itself. Firstly, we’ve added a new source of environmental data: NOAA’s Twentieth Century Reanalysis project. You can now view environment data for tornado events all the way back to 1879. Since 20CR does not have the same level of spatial or temporal resolution as ERA5, ERA5 data is preferred where both are available (1940-). ERA5 data was recently expanded back to 1940, so as of this update, high-resolution environment data is available for the 40s too.
We’ve also changed the timeline to a non-linear style, allowing us to expand it back to the year 0 (technically 1 BCE). The very low frequency of known tornado events in the 1700s and before made it unreasonable to keep to a linear timeline. With this change, you can explore European tornadoes from prior to the previous limit of 1680. (Remember to switch to the Europe or World domain in filters!) The change in scale of the non-linear timeline can be a bit confusing, so just remember at the years 1900 and 1500 the individual columns will suddenly change to covering a different duration.
Minor changes
- Added download functionality to the share tab in KML, CSV, and GeoJSON formats. This will make it much easier to access the data we’ve compiled. Note that ESWD (European) data are not available for download due to their licensing policies.
- Slightly revamped the infoboxes.
- A bunch of bug fixes