Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2020 July 29

= July 29 =

Guillermo Gonzalez (astronomer)
Does Guillermo Gonzalez (astronomer) have a middle name or initial? --Guy Macon (talk) 14:27, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think so, no paper by him or about him seems to cite a middle name/initial even if all co-autors/contributors do have one, e.g. here [], and here they state that he has none (or they also found none): "Guillermo Gonzalez, no middle initial, b. 1963" at []. But I would have expected it, this 'middle name or initial' seems to be a pure US American habit. 2003:F5:6F0C:9500:4070:591A:3CFE:72F (talk) 16:41, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Marco PB
 * Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 17:07, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Tornadoes
Which area of the USA sees the most tornado warnings per year? I mean a single location, not a state or county. According to this Jackson, Mississippi averages 2.5 warnings a day. That can't be realistic, right? 93.136.62.103 (talk) 23:06, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Sounds perfectly plausible to me, as days with such warnings will often have multiple warnings.--Khajidha (talk) 00:02, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Really? That sounds like an extreme amount to me here in Europe. With 8000 probable tornado events in 10 years, how is any part of the city still standing?! How many days a year do such tornado-prone places actually have tornadic thunderstorms? 93.136.62.103 (talk) 00:28, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Nowhere near all of those warnings actually result in tornadoes, though. But see tornado alley. --Khajidha (talk) 01:16, 30 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Jackson, Mississippi is fairly good-sized, so even if hit by a tornado the damage is likely to be localized within some part of the city. When small towns are hit, it can be a different story. See Xenia, Ohio, for example. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:21, 30 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Among the places you can look:
 * NOAA's Storm Prediction Center - especially in their Severe Weather Events Archive
 * NOAA Climate Science and Information
 * the Storm Events Database archive at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information ("...Formerly the National Climatic Data Center", the name you will probably recognize if you've been a student of weather science for a while).
 * Of course, the first place I looked was my paper copy book of the Aviation Weather Advisory Circular, AC 00-06A (or the newer "B" edition, also available at zero cost). In Chapter 11, the chapter on severe weather (thunderstorms), there are annual average charts with isolines around the mean number of thunderstorms per year.  Personally, I find this to be the most meaningful way to visualize the data for "where the most storms happen," though you could probably deduce any number of other ways to parse and chart and graph the raw data products.
 * Quoting directly from that book: "Tornadoes occur most frequently in the Great Plains states east of the Rocky Mountains.  Figure 111 shows, however, that they have occurred in every State."  Figure 111, a few pages later, normalizes tornado incidence, characterizing the "mean annual number of tornadoes per 10,000 square miles."  This is not the only way to compare event-counts - after all, Texas is a lot bigger and more densely-populated than Oklahoma, so while Oklahoma has fewer tornadoes than Texas, Oklahoma also has more tornadoes per person and more tornadoes per square mile!  So you can see one example of how things get complicated, when you look into the details - even if you spend just a few minutes digging in!  It only gets more complicated as you learn more about climate and statistics and data-science.
 * If what you specifically seek is the number of issued tornado warnings, you ought to know that an issued warning does not have a one-to-one correspondence with a weather-event. Here is an informational page explaining exactly what it means when there is a tornado alert from the National Weather Service.  So if you are trying to interpret the number of events, with any kind of meaningful scientific rigor, you need to be aware of the bias between the rate of occurrence of (one or more) natural event(s) and rate of issuance of one or more alert(s) for the event(s).
 * The original question asked about a "single location," ... but I won't even try to crack open the proverbial can-of-worms that encases any meaningful effort to define the word "location" in a manner that is suitable for such a task. Shall we compare the weather-events that occur inside a single city?  But how can we do so in a fair manner, when we consider Jackson, MS - land area 290 square kilometers - against, for example, Sitka, Alaska - whose city limits include over 12,000 square kilometers?  Is it even remotely meaningful to compare "number of tornados per municipality"?  And what about tornado events that occur in the great swathes of "unincorporated" areas - events that occur but do not ever encroach on any city at all?  Shall we count tornado events per registered place-name for all types of cultural and geographical feature?  Each of these, in fairness, do have a specified single "location"... "not a state or county,"... but unfortunately, not all their boundaries are mutually-exclusive...
 * Among the many ways you could try to resolve these troubles, you could simply allow a researcher to aggregate the data, define a heuristic, and publish their summary results for you... and that is exactly what was described in the summary article linked in our OP's original question. For more details on that particular method, the scientists who did that work have a whole website: Severe Weather at the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, from Iowa State University, with fun polygon datasets for the geometrically-inclined reader.
 * Nimur (talk) 14:03, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the detailed answer Nimur! I see my question wasn't specific enough. Let's say, how many times a year (or how many days a year) does the average resident of Jackson, Mississippi cower under his basement stairs? Is there data on this? For example I've found this map of Dallas which has a whole lot more tornadoes than I expected, but surely this doesn't add up to anywhere near 800 a year? And anyhow the whole dataset for last 12 months on the Iowa State university page adds up to only 2k tornado warnings.
 * I'm confused on how common tornadoes are - how likely is an average American to experience one in his lifetime? For example the tornado article says "The United States has the most tornadoes of any country, nearly four times more than estimated in all of Europe, excluding waterspouts." That would be 300 tornadoes a year for us, yet I don't remember the last time I even heard that a tornado struck someplace here. 93.136.62.103 (talk) 16:24, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Again, number of warnings is going to be much higher than number of actual tornadoes. As for actual experiences, several touched down in my neighborhood about 3 years ago. All in a row. In about an hour. --Khajidha (talk) 16:36, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * For reference, my state (North Carolina) has had 336 tornadoes touch down in the last decade. That's about 34 a year. In an area a little larger than Greece.--Khajidha (talk) 16:51, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's a lot! Raleigh area has 279 warnings for that period (Jackson has 1032 - I wonder where that 8000 number came from). How many days a year do you have to shelter from such storms?
 * Interestingly I've found my country (Croatia, roughly the size of W. Virginia I've been told) listed as one of Europe's most tornadic yet we actually don't get these things at all, I don't know where these people get their data. Apart from regular videos of panicking tourists fleeing the beach from innocent waterspouts (we get a ton of those) I can think of 3 things: 1) a storm hit in my city (1-1.5M ppl) and produced a tornado 30-40 years ago (this could be just an urban legend), 2) a few years ago newspapers reported a tiny tornado throwing around lawnchair and barbecues in a big storm (possibly just a rumor as no meteorologists were interviewed), 3) last year an extraordinarily strong waterspout came ashore at the seaside and ripped some trees and roof tiles  (EF0? - this happens there every several years maybe, but that's a waterspout coming ashore, not a true tornado). If we're the best Europe has to offer, then that claim about only "nearly four times" is nonsense. 93.136.45.191 (talk) 19:17, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * As a general tip: random internet blogs are poor sources for climate data, even if the author is an enthusiast.
 * Weather theory is extraordinarily complex, and the data archives that support true scientific study are also quite complicated. In view of how important a scientific understanding of our climate is to our wellbeing, it is very important to scrutinize your sources of information: when in doubt, avoid the blogs and commercial weather services - stick to peer-reviewed science publications!
 * Nimur (talk) 18:06, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Just noticed something that the original poster seems confused about. The 8000 warnings are not for Jackson, Mississippi, itself, they are warnings issued from that city's NWS office and cover a large surrounding area (including parts of several states). --Khajidha (talk) 20:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Why don't they ever seem to make maps of how many millitornados per 100 square yards each century or how many millennia between tornados inside that 10 yard square, where any EF1 winds in any part of that square is a tornado even if its center never came within a half mile of you? That's what I really want to know, and what I suspect someone who lives in an average size house really wants to know. The square should be orthogonal to the geographical coordinates, as roads and property lines are due north or east for the great majority of Tornado Alley residents. Per 10,000 square miles is more useful to tornado buffs wanting to conveniently chase them as often as possible. Does anyone try to see as many as they can per decade or lifetime with leaderboards and RAW radius or mileage-limited tornadoseeing leagues and geotimestamped photos? Those maps would be great for them. Like maybe you know you'll never compete with those Oklahomans if you stay in your hometown in Kansas so you seek a home more tornadoey but at an intersection of orthogonal fast roads but with long empty stretches to the northeast and southwest and east and west. Smarty move. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:47, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

What timing that I asked this question this week. I found out my city apparently had a tornado warning today. Is ESTOFEX a reliable source? 93.136.70.168 (talk) 03:13, 4 August 2020 (UTC)