Peripheral townships have emerged as well over the years, some of which are now wholly surrounded by OKC city land. OKC covers a large area today, but the city limits have changed over the years such that some areas that are now part of OKC were not always within the city limits. After 1950, records were cross-checked using Storm Data and the severe weather database compiled at the Storm Prediction Center (SPC).Ī second obstacle arose in determining exactly where the OKC city limits are - or were. Thus there are no records on weak tornadoes prior to 1950 (unless they happened to make it into the WSFO listing), and so the true number of tornadoes probably is much higher than the total arrived at herein. The compilation by Grazulis includes all tornadoes of F2 intensity or greater, and all killer tornadoes, from 1880 through 1989.
The only readily- available data source prior to 1950, other than the local records on station at WSFO OKC, was Grazulis (1990).
One was the lack of reliable sources for events that occurred before 1950. This turned out to be a formidable task, for several reasons. In 1991, a project was initiated to revise the list by adding recent tornadoes (since 1978), validating existing entries, and searching for any others that might have been overlooked. Sometime later, record keeping ceased for some reason and the existing list was relegated to a binder that was lost among the growing masses of other records that accumulated at the office. That list included 43 tornadoes as of 1978. The source of the number most likely was a local listing, kept on station at the National Weather Service Forecast Office (WSFO OKC). In the 1960s and 1970s, news and magazine articles sometimes quoted the number of times OKC has been struck by tornadoes that number typically was in the 30s or lower 40s, depending on the year of publication. Oklahoma City (OKC), by virtue of its large areal extent and location near the heart of "tornado alley," has earned a reputation over the years as one of the more tornado-prone cities in the United States.
0 kommentar(er)
