Moving to a tornado-prone area? Five questions to ask to help you reduce risk.

Here are five questions to help reduce the risk you and your family may face from tornadoes.

3. How will I know a warning has been issued?

Some communities use sirens; others may use reverse 911 calls or text messages pushed out to mobile phones.

Check with your local NWS forecast office or community emergency management office to find out the best way to get a warning in a timely fashion.

Moreover, it's important to recognize that adjoining communities have different approaches to warnings; what you hear on a weekend may be different from what you hear during the week if you live and work in different communities.

In a followup study of a tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., in May 2011, NIST researchers found that Joplin used the same siren pattern for tornadoes that it did for other wind events. And it used a different pattern than did some surrounding communities. Indeed, the researchers surveyed 75 communities across the US and found a wide variety of siren patterns used as tornado warnings. One recommendation from the study: The US needs to establish a uniform set of "clear, consistent" standards for community-based tornado warnings.

It's wise to have more than one way to receive the warnings, if possible. Thunderstorms that dropped a tornado in Woodward, Okla., in April 2012 also dropped a lightning bolt that disabled the siren-warning system for a section of the city that later was hit by the tornado.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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