11/20/2011 Tornadoes!

I have recently become very interested in “GIS in Disaster Response”, and am investigating ways to serve our country in times of Disasters. Since more and more people are now living on a continually-unstable planet, “Disasters” are certainly not going to “just go away” – they happened in the past, they are happening now, and they will continue to occur in the future.

At a seminar I attended last week, one speaker spoke of his frustration at not having (geographic) information regarding “tornado damage” a few years ago in New Hampshire – the data had not been assembled, in one place, to allow the generation of $ damage estimates across multiple counties. (That situation has improved with the creation of the New Hampshire Mosaic Parcel Map)

This led me to think about a map showing tornadoes – their locations and their paths. Which led me to the Tornado History Project:

I selected Massachusetts (my home, but not a hotbed of tornado activity, or so I thought):

The map shows 152 tornados from 1951 through 2008, with 102 fatalities – nothing to make light of. At the bottom of the page, I click the link for the Storm Prediction Center’s (SPC) historical tornado data file, and get taken to the page where I can download csv files of Tornado/Hail/Damaging Wind:

This data page is a FABULOUS page! Scroll up, and there is a beautiful collection of heat maps, thematic maps, plot charts of tornado reports over time, small-multiple time series maps, monthly Summary Charts, and a map of Actual U.S. tornadoes for January through July, 2011:

Obviously I can not discuss all those visualization tools today – each will be a separate blog this coming week! But for today, I have discovered that, although each event is unique and tragic, tornadoes occur repeatedly over time, the historical data exist, and the visualization tools are already out there. From the data comes knowledge, and with knowledge we can prepare ourselves to respond when disasters (in this case, tornadoes) occur in the future.