ArticleNature communications2016
Tornado outbreak variability follows Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling and increases dramatically with severity.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Mental Health Impacts of Tornadoes: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Taylor's law predicts unprecedented pulses of forest disturbance under global change.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Classifying synoptic patterns driving tornadic storms and associated spatial trends in the United States.NPJ climate and atmospheric science · 2025Article
- COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States follow Taylor's law for heavy-tailed distributions with infinite variance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Spatial and temporal autocorrelations affect Taylor's law for US county populations: Descriptive and predictive models.PloS one · 2021Article
- Predicting the Outbreak Risks and Inflection Points of COVID-19 Pandemic with Classic Ecological Theories.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2020Article
- Assessing and Interpreting the Metagenome Heterogeneity With Power Law.Frontiers in microbiology · 2020Article
- Analyzing and interpreting spatial and temporal variability of the United States county population distributions using Taylor's law.PloS one · 2019Article
- Chagas disease vector control and Taylor's law.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2017Article
- Biological and statistical processes jointly drive population aggregation: using host-parasite interactions to understand Taylor's power law.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Synchrony affects Taylor's law in theory and data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tornadoes cause loss of life and damage to property each year in the United States and around the world. The largest impacts come from 'outbreaks' consisting of multiple tornadoes closely spaced in time. Here we find an upward trend in the annual mean number of tornadoes per US tornado outbreak for the period 1954-2014. Moreover, the variance of this quantity is increasing more than four times as fast as the mean. The mean and variance of the number of tornadoes per outbreak vary according to Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling (TL), with parameters that are consistent with multiplicative growth. Tornado-related atmospheric proxies show similar power-law scaling and multiplicative growth. Path-length-integrated tornado outbreak intensity also follows TL, but with parameters consistent with sampling variability. The observed TL power-law scaling of outbreak severity means that extreme outbreaks are more frequent than would be expected if mean and variance were independent or linearly related.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.