The crucial role of damage surveys in tornado science

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Why do researchers conduct damage surveys after a tornado hits?

The biggest reason is to develop a climatological database for when tornadoes are occurring, where tornadoes are occurring and how intense tornadoes are.

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When you actually go to perform a damage survey, the first thing we want to do is figure out where the tornado started causing damage in the first place. So you want to establish a start point, and that is typically informed-at least as kind of a first-order guess-by radar data.

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If meteorologists can't get out right away to do a survey, or can't do so at all, can they use photographs?

It all depends on the quality of the photograph and what the photographer knows or doesn't know about damage surveys. If you have someone out there who knows what they're looking for and is zooming in on, for example, the connections between floor joists and the foundation [which can tell them how much wind a structure should be able to withstand], you can get a pretty good feeling for the damage.

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Damage surveys are critically important to informing our U.S. tornado climatology. If we stop having the ability to go out and actually do damage surveys consistently, that is going to throw off our whole understanding of what's happening with tornadoes in time.

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