…or at least some perspective. In those unsettling years after I lived through my first tornado on the family farm at the age of 4 in the mid-’60s, I hunted down any book on tornadoes and thunderstorms that I could find.
One book – admittedly written for young people but still passing itself off as a serious attempt to explain severe weather such as tornadoes and hurricanes – proclaimed that tornadoes happened more often in eastern Kansas than western Kansas.
We seemed to have a tornado hit the farm or pass within view every year in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So when I arrived in Wichita to go to college and later to work at the Eagle, I was amazed to discover that no one I talked to had ever seen a tornado.
After all, this was “eastern Kansas” (at least compared to where I grew up), and I figured they were commonplace in the area.
As I spoke to storm chasers and meteorologists about why tornado statistics seemed skewed toward eastern Kansas, a simple but telling point kept surfacing: there are more people to see a tornado when it touches down in the eastern half of the state.
With the proliferation of storm chasers and what I call “tornadotainment” – tours in which people pay thousands of dollars to see a tornado, and average folks who toss a camcorder in the pickup and scramble after ominous clouds whenever a tornado warning is issued in their area – it’s a lot tougher for a tornado to go unnoticed these days.
So many tornado “records” are being set these days – or are just a few years old – that people may think Mother Nature is generating more tornadoes than in the past.
I don’t buy that. Not yet, anyway. I suspect it’s a matter of more people being in position to see them than there used to be – no matter where they’re touching down.
Consider this twist on an old joke: If a tornado touched down but nobody saw it, did it really happen?
When it comes to tornado statistics — especially in years past — that answer could well be “no.”