We're Not (Only) in Kansas Anymore: Tornadoes Beyond Tornado Alley
The layperson's perception of tornadoes is that they are near-exclusive to the U.S. Great Plains and Midwest, where a favorable combination of near-storm environmental conditions is most often present in the spring and summer. In reality, of course, tornadoes occur over a wide variety of geographical locations, times of day, and seasons, with complications such as low population density leading to specific challenges in issuing watches and warnings as well as establishing climatologies for such rare events in the first place. After a brief introduction to the dynamics underlying the formation of tornadoes, this talk explores the use of machine learning-aided clustering to characterize the prototypical environments in which tornadoes form, then takes those results a step further by discussing how and why tornadoes can occur despite the apparent absence of key dynamic and kinematic "ingredients" in the environment.
