In order for a thunderstorm to become severe it must have hail at least ¾ of an inch or greater in diameter, winds greater then 58 miles per hour or produce a tornado. In the spring and summer months, severe storms have been known to form and move across New York State. Historically, a large percentage of damage reports are located in the Southern Tier. This suggests that it is due to topographic influences. In order to examine the proposed hypothesis severe storm damage reports from the Storm Prediction Center historical data archive will be used. The database contains events from 1950-2005. These events will be plotted in a GIS environment to allow the overlay of topographic relief to exam the spatial distribution. The examination of the storm reports will focus on clustering of reports in order to examine regions of enhanced localized activity.
|Presenter:||Jessica McLaughlin (Undergraduate Student)|
|Time:||9:30 am (Session I)|