Tornado Early Warnings are needed – not more watches, alerts, or advisories!

by John Flanagan on April 28, 2011

Effective Tornado early warnings are needed as clearly and dramatically seen in the recent events across the USA.  Several hundred lives have been needlessly lost because our society has not made proper use of existing and available technology.
Reality is not an optional choice – the simple overriding fact is that the current system of tornado watches, alerts, and advisories just do not work effectively because most people ignore or are not aware of them until it is too late. We continue to blame human nature instead of fixing the current system and making use of the tools we now have readily available.  Placing blame instead of fixing the problem is easier but human life is too precious to squander any longer.
FOUR FACTS:
1)  Existing Doppler radar systems in almost all modern airports and weather service stations are technically able to “see” tornadoes as if they were viewing the live on your television screen.
2)  These systems know the rotational speed (magnitude/strength) of the tornado in real time.
3)  These systems know the direction of travel along the ground of the tornado in real time.
4)  These systems know the speed of travel along the ground of the tornado in real time.
With this information, it is a very simple and very easy to know almost EXACTLY where the tornado will be in 1 minute, in 5 minutes, in 10 minutes and in 15 minutes.  Obviously, the dynamics of an existing tornado on the ground changes and the degree of confidence of EXACTLY where the tornado will be over an extended time is lower; there is a very high degree of probability of where it will be over a very extended period of time as long as it tracks along the ground.  Some of these recent storm tornado tracks covered as much as 200 miles.
There should NEVER be a reason why warnings are issued and cover an entire county or state.  County wide warnings are worse than no warnings because they encourage willful disregard for all warnings.   When these very wide area warnings are given the vast majority of people who hear them are not in any kind of danger.  So for these 90% of a given population that is warned but is not in real danger it is a false warning.  After a number of false warnings it is very human to simply stop paying attention and to ignore the warnings.  Yes – this is reality.