Angle Distributions

As previously stated, the Tornado directions seem to mostly lean toward the Northeast direction. To quantify this trend, I decided to look at the distribution of each Tornado spatial angle. The very helpful GeoDirection function of Mathematica can analyze each of the Tornado path angles.

This function outputs an angle in degrees called the azimuth. Below is an azimuth circle that shows what direction each angle means. The 0 degrees starts at North, while an increasing angle travels clockwise around the circle. From the Northeast prediction, there should be a higher distribution of angles around the 40-60 degree mark.

Oklahoma

At first the histogram produced for Oklahoma showed a very normal distribution near this mark, however, there is also a large volume of tornadoes at the 200 degree mark.

To solve why this was the case, I tested each of the slope clusters I had created from the clustering post. The undefined/0 slope cluster is the culprit as shown below.

So I removed the cluster of Tornados with no slope from the original histogram to get a better distribution. This distribution follows the Northeast trend as I expected, with most tornadoes in between that 40-60 degree area.

Florida

I expect Florida to follow the same pattern but with less Tornadoes in general, and it does on a more normal scale.

Louisiana

Louisiana also follows this trend.

For the Future

I want to now move away from the Tornado paths and onto my other questions previously stated.