Abstract
A survey consisting of open-ended and closed responses was administered at three universities in the eastern USA. The home counties of survey participants represented climatological tornado risks spanning from rarely impacted to frequently impacted. The first objective of this research was to classify climatological tornado risk for each county so that analyses of tornado perception accuracy could be evaluated. Perception accuracy was defined as the difference between what each participant perceived minus what actually happened. A manual classification scheme was created that uses the Storm Prediction Center’s Convective Outlook framework as county climatological risk categories. Participants from high-risk counties statistically significantly overestimated the numbers of violent tornadoes compared to participants from every risk category but moderate. Furthermore, participants from high-risk counties had significantly greater tornado impacts, thus validating the classification of high-risk. Participants from high, moderate, and slight-risk counties significantly overestimated the number of strong tornadoes compared to participants from enhanced-risk counties. There appeared to be no relationships between tornado memory and tornado sentiment with tornado perception accuracy. Possible explanations for the overestimation of the numbers of violent tornadoes in high-risk counties are discussed.
Highlights
Destructive tornado outbreaks often cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and lasting negative memories, especially among children and adolescents [1,2,3]
The objective shifted to estimating the number of strong and violent tornadoes that occurred to understand the impacts of tornado activity on perception accuracy
The moderate and slight risk counties showed significantly greater perception than the enhanced counties for strong tornadoes (p = 0.035, and p = 0.041) (See Table 3). These results suggest that participants from high-risk counties have an inflated perception of the number of strong and violent tornadoes that have occurred
Summary
Destructive tornado outbreaks often cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and lasting negative memories, especially among children and adolescents [1,2,3]. Risk perception can be defined multiple ways, including a strict focus on hazard frequency, which we refer to as climatological risk [13], or as a broad concept that includes vulnerability and the potential for the hazard to cause harm [15] Both aspects of risk, perceived frequency and vulnerability, are important for understanding human behavior surrounding atmospheric hazards, such as tornadoes. Mason et al [17] found that perceived climatological tornado risk, along with prior experience with tornadoes, was positively associated with the likelihood of receiving a tornado warning at night; meaning if someone perceived a greater hazard frequency they made more effort to receive warnings. After receiving the tornado warning, Brotzge and Donner [14]
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