Severe Wx climo by radar site

[Jason McKittrick]

Has anyone else found this link on the SPC website. I was surfing this morning and came across an interesting new feature on the SPC site,

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/rda/.

For those of us planning chase vacations this year I think this is a good starting point.
It breaks down all the severe weather reports for the last 25 years and displays the frequencies by; time of year, time of day and by year. It also ranks each site by number of reports, Oklahoma City is as you would expect #1, however, a surprise to me Omaha is ranked quite high, ahead of Wichita and Hastings.

 

[Robert Dewey]

Wow, that's pretty sweet!

 

[Ronnie Bradley]

deflecter shield for SE / E White County

Hope I don't jinx that part of White County! :shock:

Notice how the significant (F2+) stop just short of Searcy and the eastern / southeastern White County is devoid of sig. twisters. Of cours that can change in the future. The Rita spawned F2 that went through the southern / southwestern part of Searcy toward Center hill isn't featured here but when they re-do the graphs to include 2005 data, it will likely be added. Some of those tracks came within a mile or so of my location (notebly Jan 21, 1999 and May, 2001 and 2003).

 

[Joel Wright]

Wow, that is freaking awesome!!

SPC has really developed some very cool features on their site over the last few years.

Rich and others have definitely done a hell of a job! 8)

 

[mrobinett]

That is very cool, thanks Jason!!

 

[mikegeukes]

Here is another lsite, both of these sites been online for some time.
http://www.spc.nssl.noaa.gov/climo/online/grids/

Mike
http://mgweather.com (There are very few jobs in weather)

 

[Joel Taylor]

This is really good stuff. It's interesting to see how the data is skewed to the population centers. There's was probably a lot of things that were missed before the abundance of stormchasers started in the late 90's. I can think of at least a couple of small tornadoes that I witnessed growing up (halfway between Elk City and Cheyenne OK) that are not listed on the first website. One was in the late eighties and the other over labor day weekend in '93. Both were small and only lasted a couple of minutes, but they were definately tornadoes. There's no telling how many events have gone unrecorded.

 

[Justin Turcotte]

This is really good stuff. It's interesting to see how the data is skewed to the population centers. There's was probably a lot of things that were missed before the abundance of stormchasers started in the late 90's. I can think of at least a couple of small tornadoes that I witnessed growing up (halfway between Elk City and Cheyenne OK) that are not listed on the first website. One was in the late eighties and the other over labor day weekend in '93. Both were small and only lasted a couple of minutes, but they were definately tornadoes. There's no telling how many events have gone unrecorded.

I have been moving at a snails pace to write my thesis on this topic. Much of the research is done and some of it is on my web site in the climo section. For most CWAs in the central U.S. there appears to be a logarithmic relationship between tornado frequency and population density. The same appears true for tornado intensity. I believe I came up with a 47% increase of tornadoes for the 1950-2001 period in OK by integrating the limit of the log curve over the domain. Tornado population reporting bias has been studied for almost two decades. I was more curious about how many tornadoes are rated low on the f-scale becuase they don't hit anything. Turning OK into the 100% urbanized planet on Star Wars yields 59% more F1+ and 84% more F2+ tornadoes.

The SPC data is really neat to look at. It will be real interesting to see how the data looks for the next 25 years now that we have good chaser and spotter saturation.

 

[Andrew Khan]

I did know about this, however our local NWS had it linked externally, rather than on the actual NWS site, it looks like now they have it hosted as theree own.