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Wind speed estimates of the December 2021 Quad-State Tornado in Mayfield, KY based on treefall pattern analysis

Metadata Updated: December 15, 2023

A violent tornado outbreak occurred on December 10-11, 2021 in the Midwest US. One of the tornadoes, known as the Quad-State tornado, tracked across four states and devastated the downtown area of Mayfield, KY, producing high-end EF-4 damage. The data here provides a series of wind speed and direction time histories of the Quad-State tornado for 44 damaged residential houses in Mayfield, KY, which can be useful for detailed forensic analysis of the residential building damage. The data was generated using a software that performs a treefall pattern analysis method, developed by the first author. In addition to the many structural damage, the tornado damaged a large number of trees in the Mayfield area. The fall direction of the damaged trees displayed a converging pattern, caused by a rotational wind flow, which is a typical indicator of a tornado. The converging treefall pattern then can be analyzed to characterize the tornadic flow and estimate the wind field (i.e., treefall pattern analysis method). The treefall pattern analysis method simulates a series of tornadoes using an idealized Rankine vortex model and generates a virtual treefall pattern, which is used to compare to the treefall pattern observed in the field and iterated until the "best-matching" pattern is found. In order to reduce the uncertainty in the estimates, the translational speed of the tornado was estimated based on tracking the motion of the vortex signature from the nearest NEXRAD radar, and the Radius of Maximum Wind (RMW) and decay exponent of the Rankine vortex model were estimated based on the structural damage. Then, the software was used to estimate the rest of the vortex parameters and wind time history (e.g., wind speed and direction) at selected locations. More detailed description on the parameter estimation and software will be published later in the NIST Technical Note.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date December 15, 2023
Metadata Updated Date December 15, 2023
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from NIST

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date December 15, 2023
Metadata Updated Date December 15, 2023
Publisher National Institute of Standards and Technology
Maintainer
Identifier ark:/88434/mds2-3025
Data First Published 2023-10-16
Language en
Data Last Modified 2023-07-17 00:00:00
Category Resilience:Windstorm impact reduction, Resilience:Disaster and failure studies
Public Access Level public
Data Update Frequency irregular
Bureau Code 006:55
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 21db572c-0e8b-4283-9c1d-a46dbcf791eb
Harvest Source Id 74e175d9-66b3-4323-ac98-e2a90eeb93c0
Harvest Source Title NIST
Homepage URL https://data.nist.gov/od/id/mds2-3025
License https://www.nist.gov/open/license
Program Code 006:045
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 283de8c43ead3cfa222490f744f4d129fda5ebbaa1416fe11b0f2b1f4154030b
Source Schema Version 1.1

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