Stunning Visualization of 56 Years of Tornadoes in the US

By Nancy Atkinson - May 31, 2012 at 7:15 PM UTC | Planetary Science
TornadoTracks_.jpg

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It's a

wonder of nature, baby

. Using information from data.gov, tech blogger

John Nelson

has created this spectacular image of tornado paths in the US over a 56 year period. The graphic categorizes the storms by F-scale with the brighter neon lines representing more violent storms.

Makes you want to hang on to something solid.

Nelson also provided some stats on all the storms in the different categories:

The numbers represent total deaths, total injuries, average miles the storms traveled F0: 7, 267, 2 F1: 111, 3270, 6.58 F2: 363, 10373, 11.4 F3: 958, 18160, 17.80 F4: 1912, 28427, 28.62 F5: 1013, 11038, 38.87

This provides a new appreciation for the term "suck zone" used in the movie "

Twister.

"

While tornadoes don't travel in straight lines, Nelson explains that based on the data, the vectors were created using touchdown points and liftoff points.

Nelson said he got the data from this

Data.gov pag

e doing a "tornado tracks" search.

See Nelson's original post.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com