On Twisters and Killer Tornados

Given the trouble I got into after my post on the Japan earthquake, I probably should stay put when it comes to looking at data on hazardous events …

More seriously, as statistician (or data analyst in general) we often lack the expertise from the domain expert, who usually collected the data. Today, in a “data everywhere” world, we are in the fortunate position to easily access interesting data from various domains, but probably don’t know much about the background.

Thus I was happy to see the three posts

on Jim’s blog. As Jim has a BS from SUNYA in Atmospheric Sciences, MS from FSU in Meteorology, and a PhD from ISU in Agricultural Meteorology, I am pretty sure he knows enough about tornados to reason beyond speculations.

You can find the data (5.5MB) here to play around yourself, which was compiled from this NOAA website. If you need a tool, you might be happy to use Mondrian.

PS: Jim agreed to write a guest post in the next few weeks, so we might learn a bit more on tornados here soon.

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