Template talk:Infobox storm

Tornadoes

I feel like this merge was improperly carried out; having 1999 Salt Lake City tornado read "Maximum rated tornado" instead of "Rating" is unacceptable (individual tornado infoboxes should not read the same as tornado outbreaks). Please amend this problem. Dustin (talk) 15:42, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

At this point, I think it would be easier to change the label to "Rating" for both tornado outbreaks and individual tornadoes. Would you be OK with that? Paging Andy who performed the merge. Alakzi (talk) 15:51, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't know. Can an "outbreak" parameter or something along those lines not be added? Or some parameter for individual tornadoes that changes it from "Maximum rated tornado" to "Rating"? Sorry if I seem overly critical, but I don't want this to be ignored or forgotten about. Dustin (talk) 16:13, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it could be done, and I'll go through my replacements and change the parameter if necessary. But let's see if anybody else has got anything to add first. Alakzi (talk) 16:16, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. An additional parameter seems excessive. What about changing the label to "Maximum rating"? (Or Max rating"?) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:29, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Andy Mabbett, that just might work. When individual tornadoes have their damage assessed, there will be multiple ratings for different areas of damage. Say you have an EF5 tornado. That means the area with the greatest damage which received the EF5 rating just had the worst damage (or, in uncommon cases, mobile Doppler reading). There will also be EF4, EF3, EF2, EF1, and EF0 areas. The only possible problem is that on tornado outbreak articles, if we have the infoboxes read "Maximum rating", some not-so-well-informed readers might experience minor confusion, but I think that problem is unimportant as we tend to put things like "EF4 tornado in City, State" (the large majority of tornadoes, about 70% I believe, occur in the United States) in that parameter, which should tell the reader that we are talking about tornado ratings. If I need to clarify this response, please ask. Dustin (talk) 17:06, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

OK, done. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:36, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Casualties/Fatalities

FYI the change to casualties from fatalities/total fatalities means that on a large number of pages the template no longer displays the figure which means that there's a lot of work made for other editors. It would have been polite I think to notify such a change on Wikipedia:WikiProject Non-tropical storms. As far as I recall from the agreement to merge into this infobox it was agreed to keep this template broad so that it could be applied across many areas, however it appears to have become increasingly adapted to North America/Tornadic storms only.Lacunae (talk) 20:31, 2 December 2015 (UTC) @Lacunae: I was in the process of fixing the missing casualties problem a few months back, but I've been busy and will get back to it soon. United States Man (talk) 01:25, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Filling out wind and gust parameters with convert templates

See the following revision where I used {{convert}} to fill out the sustained wind speed and gust parameters. It caused the infobox to break and I don't know why. Is there a solution to this? Jolly Ω Janner 19:40, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

User:Jolly Janner, you found a bug! not sure how that stayed there for so long? we were using |gusts= in two different places, but it's now fixed with backwards compatibility for both syntaxes. Frietjes (talk) 01:01, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Total fatalities or Total casualties????

I've notice that half the infoboxes for storms/tornadoes has "total fatalities" for counting deaths and injuries, and the other half has "total casualties" for the same thing. Shouldn't we try to conform all of the storm infoboxes to one of them, and which one should we use?--Halls4521 (talk) 03:25, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Change from mb to hPa

I propose change from mb to hPa, as Pascal is the SI unit.Lacunae (talk) 16:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

TORRO Scale

I was just making an edit to the Birmingham tornado of 2005 and I noticed that this infobox will only link the the Fujita scale or the Enhanced Fujita scale. Would it be possible to add another variable to the table to allow it to link to the TORRO scale? TornadoLGS (talk) 22:36, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Tornado windspeeds

There are major inconsistencies in the "highest winds" parameter in tornado articles. For example at 2013 El Reno tornado it says 302 mph, this was based on mobile doppler radar observations of instantaneous maximum particle/debris motion at some unspecified altitude above the ground, not ground level winds that actually matter to people. At 2011 Smithville, Mississippi tornado it says 205 mph, this was based on a damage survey estimate of the minimum 3 second wind gusts needed to sweep away well built houses at or near ground level, but with nothing left to destroy at 205 mph, we don't know if radar would have shown 350 mph had there been mobile doppler there. At 1997 Central Texas tornado outbreak (Jarrell tornado) it says 261 mph because until 2007 it was thought that 261 mph was needed to sweep away a house.

This could lead a reader to think that EL Reno was strongest, Jarrel was weaker, and Smithville weaker still, a clearly incorrect conclusion, I am not sure what the solution to this is, but we should at least change F-scale winds to EF-scale winds so it doesn't look like all the pre-2007 tornadoes were stronger, and maybe some limit to how high off the ground the mobile radar observation can be and still go in the infobox? Or the simplest thing to do would be to just not use the max wind parameter in tornado articles. Tornado chaser (talk) 14:58, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

I would favor only using the highest winds parameter for measured wind speeds. On top of the issues mentioned above (especially that in EF5 tornadoes, wind speeds are probably minimum estimates) tornado wind speeds may be underestimated due to a lack of sufficient damage indicators. For example Tim Marshall stated that the 2014 Vilonia tornado may very well have reached EF5 intensity, but the houses destroyed were not well-built enough to derive such an estimate. But we still list 190 mph in the outbreak article. I also understand that there is still some subjectivity with these wind estimates as well. TornadoLGS (talk) 16:42, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

"Casualties" field is broken

See, for example, April 1956 tornado outbreak. In the infobox "casualties = 40 killed, 685 injured" has been entered, but for some reason the template is ignoring and not displaying this information. This error appears on a large number of similar articles, just a few I've found:

• 1980 Kalamazoo tornado
• Late-September 2006 tornado outbreak
• Tornado outbreak of mid-October 2007

The problem appears to be specifically with the "casualties" field, and not any other aliases such as "fatalities" (seen here) or "total fatalities" (seen here).-RunningOnBrains^(talk) 23:21, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Runningonbrains: fixed. Apparently "casualties" had to be added to the aliases TornadoLGS (talk) 04:54, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Part of, notes, and unknown parameters

I have fix the |partof= and updated any infoboxes using |notes= for "Part of". there are now only seven pages in "Category:Pages using infobox storm with notes parameter". checking those articles, it looks like we could possibly add a parameter for "coastal flooding severity" as measured by surgewatch.org (if this is important). I have also added tracking for |gust= with "Category:Pages using infobox storm with gust parameter" since the functionality is (non-intuitively) different for |gust= and |gusts=. I will see if there is a way to resolve this. I have also added tracking of unknown or unsupported parameters with Category:Pages using infobox storm with unknown parameters. I will fix some of these when I have time. please let me know if anything is broken. Frietjes (talk) 14:38, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Bodystyle

@MarioProtIV: The bodystyle thing should be in the template; see Template:Infobox tropical cyclone. There, the "Category" header takes up the whole space, without leaving small spaces on the ends. We can do the same thing here. I don't see why not. 🌀HurricaneCovid🌀 _(contribs) 14:15, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

@MarioProtIV: actually the bodystyle looks weird with infoboxes that don't have RSI headers, so I made it so it only does the full-width thing if there is an RSI. Is that fine? 🌀HurricaneCovid🌀 _(contribs) 15:21, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

RSI value

@MarioProtIV and LightandDark2000: Let's take this whole discussion on-wiki now. Personally, I believe we should do this the way we did on {{Infobox tropical cyclone}}. There, we have the Category at the top and what contributes to the Category (the wind speed for TCs) as a parameter below. I think we should do the same thing here: having the Category as the header and the RSI value as a parameter below. I made the RSI value stand out as much as possible: it's bolded and italicized. Also, note that many people might not understand what the exact RSI value means, and might just care about the Category, similar to TCs. We can have just the Category in the header for that reason as well. Another thing is that a decimal value like "1.788" looks weird standing out in the header, so including as a parameter is better. Anyway, thoughts? – 🌀HurricaneCovid🌀 _(contribs) 15:20, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

My problem is that even with it being bolded and italicised in there it could get buried, and the value was in the header for years and didn’t seem to be a problem before. --MarioProtIV (^talk/_contribs) 15:35, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

It's currently bolded and italicized, and at the top of the second section. The only parameters above it are Type, and the Formed and Dissipated parameters. I doubt it would get buried so high up on the infobox. – 🌀HurricaneCovid🌀 _(contribs) 15:42, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Per my edit summary, I have removed the change until an "on wiki" consensus can be reached. As for this, I would agree with MarioProtIV. It wasn't a problem the way it was. United States Man (talk) 16:46, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I never said the old way was a problem. I'm fine if we leave it as it is. However, I believe the new way is better in terms of similarity to how TC infoboxes are modeled, which is what I am in support of. On Wikipedia, we can make changes to past ideas. Things do not have to remain the same solely because they have been that way before. – 🌀HurricaneCovid🌀 _(contribs) 16:52, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Wind speed

@MarioProtIV, LightandDark2000, and HurricaneCovid: The template is set in mph (km/h); is it possible to add a parameter for European storms (not heavily involving the UK) reverting the order and setting km/h (mph, kn) i.e. metric first – knots would be nice, too.--Carnby (talk) 05:20, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Gusts

Based on experimentation this appears to do undocumented manipulation of the number put into gusts. It appears that it requires the knots value as an input, then converts it to MPH and km/hr , rounds them to the nearest 5 and then displays that. It's too late to change it but suggest documenting that. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 23:57, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

@North8000: As an aside, I have noticed that alternate descriptions ("alt") have stopped displaying when I "hover" over images such as appear in the info-box in this article. Does anyone know why? CapeVerdeWave (talk) 15:36, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

I've also noticed then when you add a cite to that item, it stops the automatic conversions. North8000 (talk) 13:57, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Infobox storm

Template:Infobox storm has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Noah, AA^Talk 15:09, 12 March 2024 (UTC)