The state is No. 1 in tornado disasters and No. 3 for flooding, according to a database of presidential disaster declarations handled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The explanation is partly atmospheric conditions that trigger twisters and flooding, partly where people live and how they build their homes, and partly politics and bureaucratic skill, according to disaster experts. Even one of the state's U.S. senators said recently that because of the way federal guidelines are written, Oklahoma is getting disaster aid more often than it needs. Caddo County, just west of the Oklahoma City metro area, has been named a federal disaster area nine times since 2007, with a litany of woe that includes twisters, floods, ice storms, a blizzard and violent winds. The atmospheric explanation is pretty basic: "Oklahoma really is the bull's-eye for awful tornadoes," said Mike Lindell, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. Oklahoma City officials estimate the Moore tornado caused up to $2 billion in damage, while state officials say it may exceed the figures for the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado. Having the president declare your community a federal disaster area is a complicated process that needs to be followed precisely. The presidential decision involves many factors, including the political clout of the region's congressional delegation and how good a case the governor makes, said University of Delaware political science professor Richard Sylves, who studies disaster declarations. The irony, said Kathleen Tierney, who heads the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, is that Oklahoma's current two senators have often opposed special disaster relief funding bills for other parts of the country, such as one earlier this year for the Northeast after Superstorm Sandy. Joseph Nimmich, FEMA associate administrator for disaster response, said Thursday that politics has absolutely nothing to do with Oklahoma's many disaster declarations: "It's purely a natural occurrence."

"Scientists by their very nature use very sophisticated language, technical language," said Jamie Rhome, leader of the hurricane center's storm surge team. To better explain the danger, forecasters talked to focus groups consisting of local and state officials, law enforcement and hospital associations and other people from Maine to New Orleans. The hurricane center also plans to show people where to expect storm surge with high-resolution, color-coded maps, much like a radar map on the local news showing rain and severe weather. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration evaluation of the weather service's performance during Sandy also recommended increasing the number of storm surge forecasters at the hurricane center, and providing potential storm surge hazards at least 48 hours before the onset of tropical storm or gale-force winds. Miami-Dade Emergency Management Director Curt Sommerhoff said his priority is getting the public to understand that the county's evacuation zones are based on storm surge, not hurricane winds. New data from the hurricane center's storm surge models prompted the county to redraw its storm surge planning zones to include inland areas along canals and rivers that previously weren't identified as being at risk for storm surge. [...] the advisories for Sandy were dramatically improved from the ones for Ike, explaining storm surge in layman's terms and easy-to-read bullet points instead of long pages of jargon that required meteorologists and emergency officials to make their own calculations.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Everything had to come together just perfectly to create the killer tornado in Moore, Okla.: wind speed, moisture in the air, temperature and timing. "Everything was ready for explosive development yesterday," said Colorado State University meteorology professor Russ Schumacher, who was in Oklahoma launching airborne devices that measured the energy, moisture and wind speeds on Monday. Several meteorologists contacted by The Associated Press used real time measurements, some made by Schumacher, to calculate the energy released during the storm's 40-minute life span. The strongest winds ever measured were the 302 mph reading, measured by radar, during the EF5 tornado that struck Moore on May 3, 1999, according to Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the Weather Underground. [...] when it comes to weather events, scientists usually know more about and can better predict hurricanes, winter storms, heat waves and other big events. [...] tornadoes are still more of a mystery than their hurricane cousins, even though tropical storms form over ocean areas where no one is, while this tornado formed only miles from the very National Weather Service office that specializes in tornadoes. Unlike hurricanes, which forecasters can fly through in planes and monitor with buoys and weather stations, usually over a period of days, tornadoes form quickly and normally last only a matter of minutes. [...] the conditions needed to form such a violent and devastating tornado were there and forecasters knew it, warning five days in advance that something big could happen, Brooks said. By Monday morning, forecasters at the National Weather Center, home of the storm lab and storm prediction center, knew "that any storm that formed in that environment had the potential to be a strong to violent tornado," he said. "Tornadoes are perhaps the most difficult things to connect to climate change of any extreme," said NASA climate scientist Tony Del Genio. Because we still don't understand all the factors required to get a tornado.

In any case, scientists just don't know whether there will be more or fewer twisters as global warming increases. They're not easy to incorporate in the large computer simulations scientists use to gauge the impact of global warming. Some scientists theorize that the jet stream is changing because sea ice in the Arctic is shrinking. A. The tornado destroyed two elementary schools and flattened neighborhoods with winds estimated between 200 and 210 mph. Winds in the area caused the storm to rotate, and that rotation promoted the development of a tornado.