Researchers with the Kentucky Geological Survey at the University of Kentucky are hoping to use devices normally meant to monitor earthquake activity to identify when tornadoes touch down.
Kentucky Seismologist Seth Carpenter said seismic monitoring stations located in Hickman, Lyon and McLean counties were able to detect vibrations from the December 2021 tornado outbreak — which spawned an EF-4 tornado that traveled over 165 miles across western Tennessee and Kentucky. Carpenter wasn't surprised by the seismic readings from the tornadoes — in fact, he said they were to be expected. Back in 2014, the instruments recording seismic activity were able to detect when a sinkhole swallowed a portion of the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green.
Carpenter said, due to the unique nature of the seismic readings from December 2021, there's a possibility seismic sensors could in the future be used to gauge tornadic activity.
"Our seismic stations are installed to record earthquakes, and usually we ignore anything else," Carpenter said. "But in this case, seeing the anomalous signals, we felt like this is something that we want to pursue with additional research."
Current methods for confirming if a tornado touches the ground rely on eyewitnesses or trained spotters. However, the UK seismologist believes seismographs could lead to a more robust tornado detection center and help to determine when a tornado touches down.
"We would love to be able to provide an additional data set that could confirm, indeed, a tornado's on the ground," he said. "If everything were to go as I would like it to go, we would be able to add some estimation of the strength of the tornado as well."
Carpenter said his team isn't the first to think about applying seismology to tornadoes. He points to research from the 1980s and a 2011 study about seismic readings from Missouri's Joplin tornado as precursors to his work. However, Carpenter still describes the scientific community's understanding of seismic tornadic activity as relatively low.
"In comparison with the vast amount of literature on other topics related to seismology, this is a very understudied phenomenon, and part of that could probably be because it's complex and it's hard to make this detection, as we were learning," he said.
To aid with research, the Kentucky Geological Survey is implementing multiple new seismic stations across the state, and the current stations in western Kentucky are being upgraded to detect a broad range of seismic vibrations. Carpenter said in the meantime he and his team would continue to study the data from December 2021 in addition to data collected from a deadly tornado that passed through eastern Kentucky earlier this year.
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