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Cedar Plains Tornado Plan: Records, Warnings and Safe Rooms

Grade 7 earth science: use a county's tornado records and warning data to forecast risk and choose safe rooms and water plant protection.

Grade 7ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS3-2

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
12 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 7
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze tornado records by month and time of day to forecast when risk is highest.
Students use warning and test data to choose technologies that reduce tornado harm.

How to use

Read the planning notes together and look at both graphs before students start. The safe room choices and the final argument work well in pairs.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS3-2

Use data on natural hazards to forecast future events and inform technologies that reduce their effects.

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Cedar Plains Tornado Plan: Records, Warnings and Safe Rooms

Use 30 years of tornado data to plan warnings, shelters and a safer water supply.

The tornado record

Read the planning notes, then use the bar graph and the histogram to answer the questions.

Planning Notes: Cedar Plains and the Next Tornado

1Cedar Plains is a city of about 90,000 people on the flat prairie of the central United States. Its planning department decides where new neighborhoods, water pipes and power lines will go. This year, city planner Ms. Rosalind Achterberg asked a group of seventh graders from the youth council to help with the part of the plan about tornadoes. A tornado is a column of air spinning very fast that reaches from a thunderstorm down to the ground. Its winds can snap power poles and throw boards and branches through the air, and flying debris causes many tornado injuries.

2The group began with county records for the 30 years from 1995 through 2024. In that time, 60 tornadoes touched down in the county. The bar graph shows the month of each one, and the histogram shows the hour of the day it touched down. Of the 60 tornadoes, 48 were rated EF0 or EF1, the two weakest ratings, 8 were rated EF2, and 4 were rated EF3 or stronger. The two strongest tornadoes damaged hundreds of homes.

3When forecasters see signs that a tornado is forming or on the ground, they send a warning. Outdoor sirens sound, and phones in the area get an alert. The time between the warning and the moment a tornado touches down is called the lead time. In 1995, a Doppler radar began scanning the county from a station 40 km away. Doppler radar can often detect air spinning inside a storm before a tornado reaches the ground. The table in Part 2 shows the lead times in the county over four 10-year periods.

4In May 2019, an EF2 tornado knocked down the power lines that feed the city's water treatment plant. The plant's pumps stopped for 30 hours, and residents had to boil their water before drinking it. The council now has money to build a community safe room and to protect the water plant. A safe room is a shelter with thick, strong walls, built so that people inside stay safe even in a very strong tornado. Before choosing a wall design, wind engineers fired a 7 kg wooden board at each test wall at 45 m/s, about the speed of debris in a violent tornado.