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Sponsored by Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS) · 9 active : 7 Republicans, 2 Democrats
Latest action: Placed on Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Calendar No. 88.
Tornado Observations Research and Notification Assessment for Development of Operations Act or the TORNADO Act
This bill requires the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to evaluate and improve its communications about hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, and other hazardous weather events.
Specifically, NOAA must establish a Risk Communication Office to evaluate the effectiveness of NOAA's communications and to identify ways to provide simpler and clearer information to the public about hazardous weather events. NOAA must also (1) establish a research program to modernize its communication systems, and (2) establish a pilot program to implement the research with respect to communications about tornadoes.
Additionally, the bill requires NOAA to develop a strategic plan for implementing the Warn-on-Forecast System, which aims to provide more advanced warnings of thunderstorm-related events (e.g., tornadoes). The bill also requires NOAA to evaluate its tornado rating system and to conduct post-storm assessments of significant events.
The bill also provides statutory authority for NOAA's Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (known as VORTEX-USA), a collaborative project between meteorologists and social scientists to study the conditions that contribute to dangerous tornadoes in the Southeast and the best ways to communicate these events to the public.
Finally, the Government Accountability Office must report on the National Weather Service's communication technology, particularly with respect to timely notices of hazardous weather events.
Members fall into . 6 representatives don’t have enough data yet and are marked “insufficient data”. Non-voting delegates are not counted. The bill is not before the House right now; these scores show where members would stand.
: only movement toward the other party counts, so members who sit further from the center than their party no longer score as swing votes.
Bars show each input from 0 to 100: ideology gap, scorecard gap, , and the . is the seat’s partisan lean, and shows how much of the input data a score has.
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These members have less than half of the model’s inputs, so their scores are not banded or ranked.






Ideology is each member’s score. The most moderate members of each party sit nearest the center line and highest on the chart. 6 representatives without a DW-NOMINATE score or with insufficient data are not plotted.
Similar votes count toward swing-v3 in the House: total similarity weight 6.5 (needs 5.0).