Tornadoes Are 100x More Likely Than We Thought, But That's Good
News  New research suggests that tornado outbreaks aren't
independent of each other, which in turn means they're a
staggering 100 times more likely than we thought—but that stormy
grey cloud may just have a silver lining.  Tornadoes are usually
assumed to be independent, which is to say that their formation
doesn't influence the formation of others. In turn, that should
mean that, given a particular set of conditions, the number of
tornadoes you'd expect on a given day would be independent of
how many other tornadoes are occurring  But a team of
researchers from Florida State University thought that seemed a
little simplistic—so they examined daily tornado counts in the
US between 1994 and 2012 to see if it was really true. When they
plotted the frequency distribution of tornado days against how
many tornadoes took place on that day, they had a shock: the
relationship actually follows a power law.  The data means
that—like earthquakes—tornadoes a