A potent cluster of thunderstorms that ripped down trees and flooded roads in parts of the region may have spawned a tornado in South Jersey on Friday afternoon. The National Weather Service said it would send a team of investigators to Atlantic County to determine whether damages were the result of straight-line winds or the kind that blow in circles.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events,