From Warning to Trust: A Multi-Channel Convergence System for Tornado Detection and False-Alarm Reduction, with a Build Guide

Tornado warning has two failure modes and only one of them gets attention. A miss is counted; a false alarm is treated as the acceptable cost of caution. But the false-alarm ratio is itself a cause of death — post-event study of the 2011 Joplin EF5 found many residents did not act on a valid warning because prior false alarms had eroded its credibility. A system that improves detection while leaving the false-alarm ratio alone reproduces that problem exactly.

This paper proposes a three-channel convergence detector built from established precursor science — infrasound, lightning rate, and surface pressure shape — in which no single channel raises an alarm and the alert tier is set by how many independent channels agree. It quantifies, for the first time in this work, what that architecture actually buys: with independent channels, requiring two of three to agree cuts the spurious-alarm rate by three to ten times, and with a contaminant that drives all three together it buys nothing at all. That result reframes the nine false-positive mitigations from a list of precautions into the mechanism the architecture runs on, since every one of them exists to keep the channels independent.

The author has built and tested nothing. This is a design and a specification, and it is written so that somebody else can build it. Section 6 is a complete build guide with hardware, siting, and a three-step experiment ladder that begins with archived public data and costs nothing. The first experiment is not tornado detection — it is measuring the noise floor, which has never been done for this instrument and which every claim below depends on.

Nothing here is a prevention system. Active-mitigation ideas from the previous version are demoted to open research questions, because no proposed intervention has a validated causal lever and warning-and-sheltering remains the only life-saving intervention available today.