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

Metadata Updated: September 30, 2025

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.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date September 30, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 30, 2025
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from Commerce Non Spatial Data.json Harvest Source

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 30, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 30, 2025
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/catalog.jsonld
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 db02b67b-b502-441d-9012-ff5719fab29b
Harvest Source Id bce99b55-29c1-47be-b214-b8e71e9180b1
Harvest Source Title Commerce Non Spatial Data.json Harvest Source
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 009363fe86d76af2434ed49c3c224d25f51e31d4a2d2e4c9bbed6c77072a258a
Source Schema Version 1.1

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