ICFs provide one of the best protections from all forms of disaster. That’s just one reason we’re so interested in seeing how those disasters affect all of us. Since we are based in Oklahoma we have always been fascinated with Tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and more That’s why when we came across these really cool visualizations of tornadoes we couldn’t resist sharing it. View and enjoy! And remember, big bad Mother Nature can huff and puff, but she’s not going to blow your ICF house down.

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We are always looking at new ways to demonstrate the wrath of Mother Nature. Tornadoes, Wildfires, Hurricanes are all beautifully visualized by IDV Solutions. Take a few minutes to look at their visualizations, stunning maps, or even purchase one for your home. What do 56 years of tornadoes look like all at once? IDV Solutions has rendered this data from the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration as a stark visualization of historic tornado risk.

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As many of us know who live in Tornado Alley, the strength of a tornado is based on the Fujita Scale, updated in 2007 to the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

The Enhanced F-scale (simple table or detailed 95 page PDF) is a much more precise and robust way to assess tornado damage than the original. It classifies F0-F5 damage as calibrated by engineers and meteorologists across 28 different types of damage indicators (mainly various kinds of buildings, but also a few other structures as well as trees). The idea is that a “one size fits all” approach just doesn’t work in rating tornado damage, and that a tornado scale needs to take into account the typical strengths and weaknesses of different types of construction. This is because the same wind does different things to different kinds of structures. In the Enhanced F-scale, there will be different, customized standards for assigning any given F rating to a well built, well anchored wood-frame house compared to a garage, school, skyscraper, unanchored house, barn, factory, utility pole or other type of structure. (The Tornado FAQ, http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/index.html)

Tornado Tracks visualizes more than sixty years of data about tornadoes in the US, in a form that makes patterns in geography and time easily observable. Watch the video below to see how we visualized data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on hundreds of tornadoes.

Each of the white trails on the map represents an individual tornado path. A path’s brightness denotes wind intensity, with brighter strokes representing more violent storms. With a combination of checkboxes and slider filters, the demo allowed users to find the most destructive tornadoes (measured by injuries, fatalities, and property damage) and the most intense tornadoes, as measured on the Enhanced Fujita Tornado Scale ─ the tool that meteorologists use to estimate tornado wind speeds.

See even more visualizations on their blog and Flickr pages.

http://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/05/tornado-tracks.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/idvsolutions/sets/72157632235116237/

Purchase Prints Here – http://www.zazzle.com/tornado_tracks_poster-228922251637394602