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The Study

It has been created especially for students who have to do reports on tornadoes.

Now, we are not going to do the report for you, and we are not going to send you stuff either by email or snail mail, but what we will do is give you ideas that will help you get started.

We don't know what class you are writing this for — but we know that students who have written to us have had that assignment in quite a number of classes — geography, science, English, physics, history, etc.

Our All States pages have a wealth of date that you can use to create your report.

So here are report ideas with possible places to find more information.

Write about a tornado that has struck in or near the town that you live in, either recently or in the past.
Ask your parents, grandparents, neighbors, or teachers to find out the approximate date, both year and month.
When you have an approximate date, ask your local librarian to guide you to find either paper or microfilm copies of the local newspaper, and to show you how to use the microfilm projector.
Scan the months that are most likely to have articles about the event. Unless it was a very small tornado, it is likely to be mentioned. When you find an article, continue to skim the paper for a week or so in case there are followup articles.
Interview people that have experienced a tornado, either in your town or elsewhere.
Ask questions like:
Did you know it was coming — if so, how?
What did it sound like?
What did it look like?
What was the sky look like before the storm?
What did it feel like before the storm?
What measures did you take to protect yourself?
How did you feel afterwards?
What might you do differently if it happened again?
Map the track of a tornado that has been written up in newspapers, using as local a map as possible. Identify the roads, rivers, businesses and homes within or near the track.
Describe the kind of damage that was done, and try to evaluate the EF-Scale intensity at each damaged building.
Describe the kind of damage that was done to crops.
Go to our All Tornadoes pages, and find your state. You may want to do this for just your county and the counties surrounding your county, or the entire state, if the numbers of tornadoes are reasonable.
Create a graph to show how many tornadoes have struck your county each year.
Chart a graph that shows how many tornadoes of each F or EF-Scale intensity occurred each year.
Make a graph that shows what time of day the tornadoes occur.
