Tornado Resources

These resources can be incorporated as homework, enhancements, or extensions. 

Old drawing of Tornado effect

  • Tropical Severe Local Storms COMET Module provides fantastic background for teachers or highly motivated advanced readers.
  • A Native American Take on Tornadoes: This NPR Protojournalist article offers a history of how the Kiowa people monitored and recorded tornadoes in the early 1900's.
  • Tornado Alley full-length Imax movie about tornadoes and the people that chase them might be good homework before launching into the Tornado Teaching Box.
  • Tornado Education Resource: This NOAA webpage has tons of explanations, resources, and activities for curriculum planning.
  •  TRMM satellite mission: This article shows 3-D precipitation and tornado data gathered in southeastern United States by NASA's TRMM satellite mision. Ask students what we can learn about tornadoes through these 3-D color profiles. What story do the colors of radar reflectivity tell us? Where is the highest concentration of precipitation in the storm? Lowest? Why would a storm at this scale occur in the southeastern United States? Would the 3-D color profiles look different in other geographical areas in the United States? If so, how would they expect a 3-D color profile to look in places such as Kansas? New York? California
  • Enhanced Fujita-Scale Online Training Modules by the National Weather Service has activities and assessments for highly interested/advanced students.
  • How do NCAR researchers use computers to study tornadoes? Find out how Dr. Tornado and her colleagues use the massive computers at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center to uncover clues about tornadoes.