CPTI Usefulness

Here’s a look at some attempts to use the CPTI for storm carrying a theoretical tornado warning. I have a fair number of thoughts on the product. In terms of a primary application. I think it would be best suited to the first update/continuation on a tornado warning. Basically allowing you to chose what types of language to use…if the CPTI is picking up on a very high intensity circulation than you are going to want to ramp up the intensity of the wording within a warning. This could be used to communicate how dangerous a storm is. Especially since the damage associated with a 80mph circulation will be drastically different from a 170+ mph circulation.

Now for areas that I would improve/and or change. The CPTI might be better off using a category scale/range of values. Intuitively, I would expect probabilities to increase if the storm is more intense. I.E. if the circulation is 155mph then I might expect the 80mph CPTI to be close to say 80% while the 155 mph CPTI is something like 50%. If the tornado intensifies maybe the 80mph CPTI would increase to something like 95% while the 155 mph CPTI increases to a value such as 75%. Currently, there are a lot of very similar values as the image below shows 80, 95, 110, and 125 mph all have pretty much the same value within 3% of one another. I would want there to be a much larger variance in these values, so that I  could easily gauge , how intense the tornado is. I think CPTI has a  great potential, but I would change it so that it was more of an probability of exceedence  scale and could be used as a quick product to determine intensity wording in products.

South Beach