Technical Note: Constructing Tornado Diagrams with Spreadsheets

Tornado diagrams are a classic tool of sensitivity analysis for decision analysis, yet engineering economy texts and TEE articles rarely include them. It is suggested that this is due to apparent barriers in constructing them—particularly for problems with positive and negative values. While the texts and articles may not represent typical engineering economy practice, they certainly lay the foundation for it. This note summarizes how to construct tornado diagrams in Excel. A template for constructing these diagrams is available from the author at aftge@uaa.alaska.edu.