Length Distributions

Oklahoma

This time I looked at the distributions of tornado lengths. I did this for Oklahoma, Florida, and Louisiana. Using the GeoDistance function I could easily find the distance between two spatial points.

Here I take the starting and ending latitude and longitude to calculate the lengths. I also use QuantityMagnitude to remove the miles units from each entry. This makes calculations on the set easier. Next I plotted the histogram of the log normal distribution of lengths.

This histogram vaguely resembles a log normal distribution. To get a more precise idea of this, I used the QuantilePlot and Kurtosis functions for further analysis.

This shows that the distribution is relatively close to that of a normal distribution. A normal distribution has a kurtosis value of 3. 4.3 is close enough to assume a normal distribution. The graph also shows that only the tails of the data deviate from the distribution.

Florida

Florida has about half the amount of tornadoes that Oklahoma has. Initially plotting the paths of each tornadoes based on the three same clusters shows that same Northeast pattern.

Analyzing the length distribution shows the same log normal distribution.

This distribution is a bit softer on the ends compared with Oklahoma. The quantile plot and kurtosis show this in more detail. Kurtosis comes back with a higher value of 4.6.

Louisiana

Finally, I plotted the paths of tornadoes in Louisiana and found the distribution of those lengths. The distribution come out once again with a fairly log normal distribution.

The quantile plot and kurtosis tell the same story as before, with a kurtosis value of 4.8.

For the Future

I want to focus next on plotting the distribution of angles to further back the Northeast direction hypothesis. I’m expecting this distribution to be spiked near 40-50 degrees.