Examining Tornado Data

Objectives:

• Students will learn about how tornadoes form and tornado safety.
• Students will use an online glossary to become familiar with weather terms associated with tornadoes.
• Students will access tornado data from the Internet and organize the data in a ClarisWorks spreadsheet and make a graph.
• Students will analyze the data (i.e. by comparing the number of tornadoes for each month to the deaths due to tornadoes).

Procedure:

1. Access Tornadoes: Nature's Most Violent Storms to read about how tornadoes form and tornado safety.
2. Access The Weather Channel's Online Glossary to define the following weather terms:

   tornado	Fujita-Pearson Scale	waterspout
   Tornado Watch	Doppler radar	satellites
   cyclone	Tornado Alley	updraft
   downdraft	downburst	funnel cloud
   troposphere	wind shear	twister
   vortex	Tornado Warning	low pressure

3. Access Monthly Tornado Data and enter the number of tornadoes, by month, for the last three years into a ClarisWorks spreadsheet and make a graph.
4. Next, for each year, prepare another spreadsheet (Remember you can copy and paste the columns from your first spreadsheet) and graph showing the number of tornadoes and the number of deaths caused by tornadoes each month.
5. The Historical Tornado Data Archive may also be useful for obtaining other tornado-related data.

Analysis:

1. Based on your first graph, during which months were tornadoes most frequent? Is this the same for all three years of data?
2. Using the information in your next graphs, during which months do the most deadly tornadoes occur? Is this the same for all three years of data? Compare the number of tornadoes for each month to the number of deaths due to tornadoes.
3. What conclusions can you draw from this data?
4. Look at a map to see the Location of Tornado Deaths for 1998. In which geographic locations do most deaths from tornadoes occur?

Assessment

• Student products will be assessed using the following criteria.

  Your final product should have the following:

• A centered title
• Names of the students completing the activity (centered)
• Spreadsheet showing all data
• Bar graph illustrating the data
• Label for the x axis
• Label for the y axis
• An analysis of the data in paragraph form.

  You can earn one point for each of the above criteria and two possible points for your analysis.