Supercell thunderstorms develop low-level rotation via tilting of environmental horizontal vorticity (
About three-fourths of all tornadoes are produced by rotating thunderstorms (supercells). When the part of the storm near cloud base (approximately 1 km above the ground) rotates more strongly, the chance of a tornado dramatically increases. The goal of this study is to identify the simplest characteristic(s) of the environmental wind profile that can be used to forecast the likelihood of strong cloud-base rotation. This study concludes that the most important ingredients for storm rotation are the magnitudes of the horizontal vertical wind shear between the surface and 500 m and the storm inflow wind, irrespective of their relative directions. This finding may lead to improved operational identification of environments favoring tornado formation.