The Influence of Tornado Activity, Impact, Memory, and Sentiment on Tornado Perception Accuracy among College Students

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 classi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAtmosphere Vol. 10; no. 12; p. 732
Main Authors Senkbeil, Jason C., Ellis, Kelsey N., Reed, Jacob R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2019
Subjects
Accuracy
Classification
climatological risk
Climatology
College students
Communication
Customization
Ethnicity
Memory
Perception
perception accuracy
Perceptions
Polls & surveys
Post traumatic stress disorder
Risk
Social networks
Storm forecasting
Storms
Surveying
tornado
Tornadoes
usa
United States > US
Tennessee
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2073-4433
2073-4433
DOI:10.3390/atmos10120732