Just who is responsible for your safety in tornadoes?

Media coverage of the late fall/early winter tornadoes that have been occurring this year includes their entirely too common efforts to seek out and give voice to those victims who say "the tornado struck without warning", despite the facts almost always showing precisely the opposite.  In most examples, timely forecasts and warnings were issued in advance of the event, sometimes literally days in advance!  I've seen this happen almost without fail every time we have major tornado impacts - over the course of my 40-year career, this has been an element in media coverage virtually in every example.

I consider this to be irresponsible reporting.  According to their clearly biased view of things, if people actually received a warning, that's not news.  It's only newsworthy when the perception is that the meteorologists dropped the ball and failed in their responsibilities.  The media should be ashamed for perpetuating the public misconceptions about the weather information meteorologists are providing for them.  So how does this false perception arise so frequently and consistently?  Why can such interview subjects be so readily found?

I've not done the surveys and research, but it seems pretty clear to me that when people interviewed by the media make the counterfactual "it struck without warning" statement, what they mean is that no one contacted them personally and told them that they needed to take shelter.   Sometimes they say that they didn't hear any tornado sirens, as if that's the only medium by which warning information can be conveyed.  Sirens can reach people who are outside in the vicinity of a siren - they're not the best and most important mechanism for disseminating tornado warning information!

What this mostly indicates to me is that some people - often those whose story is featured by the media - are simply not accepting any responsibility for their own personal safety.  In many cases, there's information about tornado threats that's available many hours, and even days, in advance of the storms.  The main point of providing this information is simply to let people know that there's a heightened tornado threat and that they need to maintain situation awareness during the time before storms develop and approach them.  Although such forecasts are not inevitably followed by major tornado events, they're sufficiently accurate to serve their intended purpose of helping people be prepared should the need arise.  Even in a major tornado outbreak, most people are not affected.  It's only the unlucky few who find themselves in a tornado's path.  But everyone should be responsible enough to keep up with the developing weather situation in cases of an enhanced threat level.

Once storms develop, the warnings are issued - in most cases, at least 15 minutes or so before the impact of the approaching tornado.  The warnings are not perfect and many of them turn out to be false alarms.  As noted, even when tornadoes do occur, the vast majority of people are not struck.  The state of the science simply won't permit perfectly accurate, extremely precise warnings and the number of perceived false alarms can only be reduced slightly by applying the best knowledge science has to offer.  The cases with the types of storms that produce the powerful tornadoes responsible for most fatalities are already handled pretty well by the forecast/warning meteorologists.  The primary problem with reducing false alarms is that it increases the likelihood of failing to warn for a tornado.  So what do people want?  Relatively frequent false alarms, or relatively frequent failures to issue a warning for an actual tornado?  Those are the only options.

It's not now possible, nor is it ever likely to be possible, to issue tornado warnings only for people who eventually will be struck by a tornado.  That's an ideal very far from the reality of what we meteorologists can do.  Even given that, however, it's evident that tornado forecasts and warnings have been saving lives here in the US since they began in 1952.  That means many thousands of fatalities have been prevented by a system that isn't even close to perfect!  While the forecasts and warnings can be improved with improved science, the existing products are not "broken"!

There's an asymmetry in the penalty function for tornado warnings.  There are ZERO tornado fatalities in a false alarm!  However, failing to issue a tornado warning for a fatality-producing tornado has a much higher penalty.  The result is a tendency to over-warn.  Tornado warnings are biased toward overforecasting tornadoes because meteorologists have a binary decision to make:  a warning forecaster either warns or s/he doesn't warn.  It's possible to reduce the bias for overwarning by issuing warnings with graded threat levels - in effect, a probabilistic threat forecast - rather than a yes/no forecast.  But such a system has yet to be implemented operationally, in part because of public demand for a virtually nonexistent certainty regarding what will happen in the weather.

In today's world, most people have many different options by which they can receive tornado forecasts and warnings.  Almost all of them require the user to make the decision to become situation aware.  People cannot simply assume zero responsibility for their own safety without running the risk of suddenly finding themselves in mortal danger.  Information about tornado hazards is readily available but people must make the effort to seek out that information without having to be told to do so.  They must plan for tornado hazards well in advance and take it on themselves to seek out information about what they can do to reduce the threat to their lives (and even their property).

The media need to become responsible for telling an accurate version of tornado events, rather than continuing to reprise the counterfactual scripted version of events that reinforces the myth of "it struck without warning".  The media have some responsibility here and to my mind, many of them are failing to carry out that responsibility.  The men and women who dedicate their lives to providing the public with the most accurate and timely weather information they can muster deserve our respect and admiration for their selfless efforts to inform.  They do not deserve to be portrayed as failing in their duties when the facts are clearly contrary to the media script.  Their failure to achieve perfection is far from being entirely their fault.