One dead and a few dozen houses and Arkansas Linears (trailers, or double-wides if you're really rich!) destroyed from our twisters last week. Odd to get them in mid-winter, but then when you get several days in the 70s in January, well, with that much energy in the atmosphere at that time of year, somethings got to blow up.
A colleague of mine has as her research specialty mapping and trying to predict tornado paths in Arkansas. Some interesting data so far, she's trying to get every path onto a GIS file and time-link it to about 30 different physical factors for a prediction set. With all the dopler and viper and various sensors and radars we have these days, if the dozen or so critical ones and how they interact could be understood, predictability could be greatly increased.
She was able to answer (for the most part) an interesting question that our regional meteorologists have wondered about for years; Arkansas is estimated to be 4th in tornado frequency, comparing population densities and length of tracks on ground, we probably fall to 5th or 6th, yet we're #1 per capita in tornado related deaths. And no, it's not the old myth that southerners sit at the kitchen table and read the bible while northerners go to their basements (which was published in a questionable meteorological text a generation ago and is a good example of how once bad or bogus information makes it into our "knowledge" stream, it's hard to remove it.) Even correcting for income (primarily frame house vs. trailers) it's primarily forest cover. In Oklahoma and Texas, you can watch those puppies miles away coming towards you, in Arkansas (and Missouri is similar) by the time you hear or see it coming over the ridge or tree tops, it's probably already in your lap. While many factors impact these trends, this seems to be the most influential factor in predicting deaths and injuries.
Natch
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