Thanks for this great post. I would like to point out that there are more convenient data formats available from NOAA (https://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/). This one seems good for the tornado problem:
Import[
"https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2024/day1otlk_20240715_2000_torn.lyr.geojson",
"Data"]