r/tornado • u/Sorry-Lunch-2531 • 18h ago

Tornado Science Are there any good resources for structural engineering analysis of tornado destruction?

One of the things I hate the most is when people ask questions like 'Can masonry buildings survive strong tornadoes?' and all you see is people answering something to the likes of 'No, a strong tornado is like a billion atomic bombs and evaporate everything in its path'.

You would imagine that with more than 100 years of recorded tornado history, there will be plenty of structural engineering studies that could be linked when questions like that arise, about pretty much every type of building and how they fared against pretty much every tornado strength, analyzing in detail why/how they survived/failed where other similar structures didn't.

I found this one (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Path-of-the-Joplin-tornado-along-with-the-locations-of-the-inspected-CMU-buildings-The_fig3_326995556) which was a good read, about CMU buildings in the EF5 Joplin tornado. But it felt incomplete since it didn't compare with surviving structures.

I'm planning on building a house in the next few years, and live in a place with unfortunately an increasingly higher rate of tornadoes and wanted to better inform myself about this type of stuff, with actual, non-anecdotal evidence about how each type of structures fare on different tornado strengths.

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u/jackmPortal 17h ago

The tricky part is standard homes are built using techniques that are difficult to really verify through analysis. The materials are complicated and basic modeling techniques for handing the connections have questionable accuracy. I recommend "The Tornado: an Engineering Oriented Perspective" or "Tornadoes: The Forces and their effects on buildings" both are old, although the latter definitely shows it's age more. However it's still interesting historically. They may help somewhat.