BTW, why can I find no Tornado Frequency/Severity data prior to 1950? BTW, why can I find no Tornado Frequency/Severity data prior to 1950?It's a little fact that irritates the globull people when I ask then what happened before then.
Also, if you track all tornadoes on a graph you will see a bump happening around 1988.
Why? Introduction of doppler radar enabled us to capture the smaller spin up tornadoes.
BTW, why can I find no Tornado Frequency/Severity data prior to 1950?
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because we didn’t start really keeping track of all them until then....
mostly using newspaper stories ..even the 1950s data is incomplete
It wasn’t until the NWS was more modern did we have to tech to get track or a reason to even care about documenting all of them
“...why can I find no Tornado Frequency/Severity data prior to 1950?”
Thanks a lot. Yet another bunnyhole. /s
Seriously, though, you piqued my interest. Valid question, “Why?”
Any logical mind cannot resist the urge.
The best that I can ascertain is that prior to 1950, Oklahoma City was preeminently the tornado capital of the world and record keeping was isolated to OKC and parts of North Texas, outlined here:
https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata
It simply wasn’t considered an NWS matter due to the lack of knowledge about tornadic systems.
The best NWS outlines is the following:
“The National Weather Service has no official tornado record prior to 1950, and other sources for early tornadoes do not list every tornado that has occurred. There are hundreds of small tornadoes that are not listed here simply because they have yet to be rediscovered, and that’s if they were ever even reported in the first place.”
https://www.weather.gov/lmk/tornado_climatology
I find no NWS directives for the decision to begin record keeping in 1950, nor any formal citation on their website. However, that doesn’t mean that the NWS head at the time didn’t authorize such records (likely, in fact).
The Storm Events Database web application, for example, wasn’t begun until 1999, so “1950” had little to do with computerization and, of course, nothing to do with Doppler Radar (1953 first meteorological use, 1973 first application for tornadic storm, later network of WSR-88D Weather Surveillance Radar- ‘1988 Doppler’).
IMHO, it was just an arbitrary starting point for a much later decision for a records database which, at the time, was likely in COBOL on tape, and the researchers/meteorologists at the time had to retroactively search back to 1950.