Introducing Tornado Archive!

Tornado Archive is a website made by meteorologists, storm chasers and weather enthusiasts with an affinity for data visualization. Recently a beloved tornado tracking website was lost form the internet, leaving us with only a few, simple tools for tracking and visualizing tornado data. However, we did not want to stop at, “Let’s reproduce what we’ve lost.” We wanted to go further. Much further.

Today, Tornado information is spread widely across the internet. The Storm Prediction Center manages a database that begins in 1950 and is updated to within 2 years. (i.e. 2019 data is included by 2021.) Additionally they provide an environment explorer, going back about 20 years for viewing meteorological data during a given notable severe weather event. Thomas P Grazulis provided us with a historical tornado coffee table book detailing tornadoes from as long ago as 1680, with tidbits of information available for all significant tornadoes until 1991. Chris Broyles (et al) created the “Violent Tornado Page” for referencing meteorological data going back nearly a century for the most extreme tornadic events.

Meanwhile, researching youtube or wikipedia for tornado information can be difficult for rare or older events. While storm chasers may meticulously document a tornado’s city, date, time, strength and record its evolution for youtube, (If for no other reason than to help sell media or get recommended), General public uploads to twitter or youtube of a given event might not even have a proper title or search tags. Wikipedia articles might document a multi-day outbreak sequence rather than have articles for a specific tornado event.

For more recent events, confirmed tornado data is spread between National Weather Service (NWS) offices, social media, and news outlets. Often the best time to collect data on a tornado occurs in the following days as information is being given. After a couple of years, there’s typically no centralized repository for this information. Again, a manual scouring of various sources is required to retroactively piece together a tornado event. And sometimes that data gets lost or archived out of public view. If we wait until a full SPC dataset is available up to 2 years later, much may inevitably be lost or forgotten before that.

And outside of the United States, almost universally there is no official source for tornado data. It doesn’t have to be like that anymore!

And finally, there’s climatology research. While the meteorological data exists and so do the tornado reports, bouncing back and forth between these two datasets or attempting to unearth evidence of climate links and evolution is a largely manual process.

Tornado Archive wants to a achieve these goals:

• The “Go-To” website for tornado data visualization
• A primary starting source for tornado related media
• Climatological and meteorological context for all tornado events (Where possible)
• A historical record that spans centuries, not decades
• A historical record that is worldwide, not just US-Centric
• Community contributed and moderated data and media enrichment
• Discussion related to Tornado climatology, media & history
• Tornado “Archeology:” Uncovering records long lost, or piecing together historical events not documented on this site.
  

We have a large, diverse, and eager team ready to tackle these ambitious goals. And down the road, we may need YOUR help. These tools, datasets and write ups will come out in stages which we will keep all of you posted about! Initially we do in fact want to “just reproduce what we’ve lost” but with many improvements to the tools we had before. Stay tuned and check back again soon for more updates!