ABSTRACT
There are approximately 1200 tornadoes reported annually in the US with the vast majority occurring east of the Rocky Mountains. The probability of any one building or structure being impacted by a tornado still remains infinitesimal. Since building codes and standards focus on the design (and retrofit) of individual facilities, this low failure (or impact) probability has made it historically difficult to justify the inclusion of tornado loading in codified building design. However, the study of community resilience seeks to enable the performance targets of individual facilities and the ability to consider their effect on their community. If the ratio of event size to community size is large enough, the recovery responsibility moves from individual facility owners to a collective mentality. In resilience planning, this can be done at planning stages but requires modeling of communities and even regions depending on the level at which decisions are being made. Therefore, in this chapter, an overview of tornado damage modeling is provided at different scales, namely the individual building, the community level requiring spatial modeling of the tornado wind speeds, and the regional level for a large outbreak of supercell-spawned tornadoes.
