The Storm Prediction Center: Where Tornado Watches Are Born

Inside a building on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, meteorologists stare at radar screens twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. When you hear that a tornado watch has been issued for your county, it came from here: the Storm Prediction Center, the single facility in the United States responsible for forecasting the risk of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the entire contiguous forty-eight states.

The idea of centralized severe weather forecasting in America goes back further than most people realize. Army Signal Corps officer J. P. Finley was issuing tornado forecasts from Washington in the eighteen seventies, though the word tornado was actually banned from official Weather Bureau forecasts for decades afterward on the theory that the public would panic. That ban held until nineteen thirty-eight.

Modern severe storm forecasting grew out of research conducted in the nineteen fifties, when military meteorologists studying tornado patterns developed the first systematic techniques for identifying conditions favorable to tornado development. The research group that emerged from that work merged with the Weather Bureau's Weather Radar Laboratory in Norman in nineteen sixty-four to form the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

In October of nineteen ninety-five, the forecasting operation, then based in Kansas City, was rechristened the Storm Prediction Center, and it relocated to Norman in January of nineteen ninety-seven. Norman's concentration of meteorological talent, including the Severe Storms Laboratory, the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology, and the National Weather Service forecast office, makes this small city the effective capital of American tornado science.

When the May twentieth, two thousand thirteen EF Five tornado struck Moore, ten miles north of this building, the Center's forecasts had given residents sixteen minutes of warning. Sixteen minutes saved lives. The science is still being built.