Tornado Impact Data: Visualizations by Andrea S. Johnson

Tornado Impacts

The National Weather Service classifies the measurements of impact for a tornado event as three distinct results:

  • Deaths
  • Injuries
  • Property Damage

NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS): Tornado events from the Storm Events database for 1996 to 2019.

Tornado

Questions Answered

  1. What are the "Measurements of Impact" for Tornado events?
  2. How does the impact data for Tornadoes look over time?
  3. Are the Measurements of Impact correlated with each other?

Conclusions:

As you can see in the plot, the three measurements of impact are correlated. In fact, by plotting the Injuries on one axis and the Damage on a second axis, we can see them overlapping.

The most destructive year for tornadoes was 2011. All of the measurements of impact are nearly 3 times higher than any other year.