Data Publication

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

Daniel M. Rhee, Marc L. Levitan, James LaDue
Contact: Daniel Rhee..
Identifier: doi:10.18434/mds2-3025
Version: 1.0 First Released: 2023-10-17 Revised: 2023-10-17
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.
Research Areas
NIST R&D: Resilience: Windstorm impact reductionResilience: Disaster and failure studies
Keywords: tornadoMayfield KYtreefallnear-surfacewind speedShow more...
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Version: 1.0 First Released: 2023-10-17 Revised: 2023-10-17
Cite this dataset
Daniel M. Rhee, Marc L. Levitan, James LaDue (2023), Wind speed estimates of the December 2021 Quad-State Tornado in Mayfield, KY based on treefall pattern analysis, National Institute of Standards and Technology, https://doi.org/10.18434/mds2-3025 (Accessed 2025-01-14)
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