Environmental and Radar Analysis of NWS Tornado Warnings 2016-18

[Randy Jennings]

At this year's NWAS conference, Evan Bentley and @Rich Thompson (SPC), Randy Bowers (Norman WFO), Justin Gibbs (WDTB), and Steve Nelson (Peachtree City WFO) are presenting a poster that looks at environtemental and radar signatures associated with verified and false alarm tornado warnings between 2016 and 2019. Some of the interesting findings include 18.5% of confirmed tornado warnings did not have a TDS and that over 25% of the time LE/EM reports do not verify (public 21%, spotter/chaser/nws employee 13%).

Full poster at:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1170358178208538625

 

[rdale]

Unless I'm misunderstanding line 9, 48% of Sheriffnadoes don't verify, not 25%?

 

[Randy Jennings]

@rdale You are correct. I was looking at the wrong table when zoomed in typing on my phone. It was 48% of LE/EM that do not confirm vs 40% public and 30% spotter/chader/nws employee.

 

[Jeff Duda]

Wait...so "Storm chaser reported tornado" reports are actually totally bogus 30% of the time? Oh, maybe that comes from them being lumped in with "trained" spotters and NWS employees. Still pretty dumb to see that a "human (with training for this) confirmed tornado touchdown" actually cannot be verified sometimes. Perhaps it is due to extremely weak and very short lived tornadoes not doing any visible damage?

 

[rdale]

That's a possibility... I'd also throw out the possibility that what they are seeing is not actually a tornado.