The Tornado Season of 1985

Ferguson, Edward W.; Ostby, Frederick P.; Leftwich, Preston W.

doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1987)115<1437:ttso>2.0.co;2

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Table 5, D06). Many of these outbreaks are well-known for their large societal impacts, including the 11 April 1965 (Fujita et al 1970), 31 May 1985(Ferguson et al 1987), 26 April 1991(Johns and Hart 1993, 3 May 1999 (Thompson and Edwards 2000), and 4 May 2003 (Lindsey and Bunkers 2005) tornado outbreaks. The positioning of these outbreaks at the top of the ranking scheme is desirable and expected, since many of the parameters used in the calculation of these indices involve the number, intensity, and societal impacts of tornadoes.…”

Section: B Characteristics Of the Three Groups Of Severe Weather Outb...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multivariate Index for Ranking

Schafer

Doswell²

2021

EJSSM

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In previous work, severe weather outbreaks have been classified either as major tornado outbreaks or as primarily nontornadic outbreaks, but the large majority of such events are of a mixed character. This study proposes a reproducible method for ranking all types of severe weather outbreaks from the period 1960-2006. Numerous nonmeteorological artifacts exist in the severe weather reports archived during this period, and many of the variables used to formulate the multivariate indices had to be detrended to reduce the effect of secular trends. The resulting outbreak rankings indicate that the methodology presented herein is able to distinguish the most significant severe weather outbreaks from intermediate outbreak days and days with a large amount of geographic scatter in the severe reports. The rankings of the most severe outbreaks and those outbreak days with a large degree of spatial scatter exhibit only limited variability when the selection of parameters and their weights are modified, but a relatively high degree of volatility is noted with the intermediate cases. This result suggests there is relatively little difference in the severity of these intermediate events. However, the particular modes of severe weather in these events can be quite different. A k-means cluster analysis of the outbreak days, using a four-dimensional representation of the multivariate indices developed, indicates that outbreak days can be separated into five groups: major tornado, wind-dominated, hail-dominated, multi-modal, and days with considerable spatial scatter of the severe reports.

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Section: B Characteristics Of the Three Groups Of Severe Weather Outb...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multivariate Index for Ranking

Schafer

Doswell²

2021

EJSSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Early results from the expanding lightning detection network included a severe tornadic storm system on 31 May 1985 (Ferguson et al 1987). This violent weather system struck Ohio and moved through western Pennsylvania, central New York, and Ontario, Canada.…”

Section: State University Of New York At Albany Early Installationsmentioning

confidence: 99%