The Notion of “Best Predictors”: An Application to Tornado Prediction

It is argued that the strength of a predictor is an ill-defined concept. At best, it is contingent on many assumptions, and, at worst, it is an ambiguous quantity. It is shown that many of the contingencies are met (or avoided) only in a bivariate sense, that is, one independent variable (and one dependent variable) at a time. Several such methods are offered after which data produced by the National Severe Storms Laboratory’s Tornado Detection Algorithm are analyzed for the purpose of addressing the question of which storm-scale vortex attributes based on Doppler radar constitute the “best predictors” of tornadoes.