Tornado folk science in Alabama and Mississippi in the 27 April 2011 tornado outbreak Kimberly E. Klockow • Randy A. Peppler • Renee A. McPherson Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract In this paper, we collect, categorize, and discuss the existence of numerous ways of knowing about tornado threat that largely differ from the perspective taken by the meteorological community. These alternate ways of knowing became apparent during interviews with survivors of the 27 April 2011 tornado outbreak in the US southeast, particularly in Alabama and Mississippi. Phenomena discussed herein include perceptions of safety near waterways, vulnerability near a specific highway with a recently modified landscape, the protective nature of hills, relative optimism about home sites, and local obser- vational weather knowledge. Theoretical explanations offered for these observed phenomena include ideas from risk perception and place attachment literatures. Keywords Tornadoes Á Risk perception Á Folk science Á Place attachment Á Alabama Á Mississippi Introduction It was out of character for everything that I’ve ever known about tornadoes. In the 57 years I’ve been on this earth, I never dreamed that that tornado down there would come up here and flatten my house. And I certainly never dreamed that it’d stay on the ground over here [coming over the ridge] [Participant 1M, Concord, Alabama]. With his right hand, our participant 1M pointed toward the southwest, where a tornado coming from Tusca- loosa had carved a path through the pine trees straight toward him on 27 April 2011. He was still clearly astonished that the tornado made it all the way from Tuscaloosa to his town west of Birmingham. He elaborated, I think I got lulled into a false sense of security because nothing’s ever happened here. Another thing, you don’t expect a tornado to stay on the ground that long. Plus you don’t know a tornado come up the hill along the ground and that tornado did it. They just don’t do things like that – or didn’t… He said that he had watched the news footage from Tuscaloosa earlier in the day with his wife, shocked but not alarmed at what was happening. After a few minutes of watching, he went back out to his driveway to work on his motorcycle in preparation for a road trip the next day. This trip and its demands weighed far more heavily on his mind than the tornado occurring over 30 miles away. Disconnected from the news, the first indication he had that the tornado was arriving (discounting the sirens he was hearing ‘‘because his county is too large’’ for a siren to concern him) was the debris that fell around him as he watched in disbelief. K. E. Klockow (&) Á R. A. Peppler Á R. A. McPherson University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA e-mail: kklockow@southcentralclimate.org 123 GeoJournal DOI 10.1007/s10708-013-9518-6