Sunday, April 24, 2011

Follow up on storm reports

I am responding to Hailstone's previous post regarding tornado reports / records. First, let me state that April has been quite active. Do I think that it's the most active April on record? Sure, if you assume that reliable records started in say ~1990 when the nationwide radar system was upgraded. But, I think that 1974, due to the one outbreak on 4/3/1974 that had ~60 tornadoes F3 or stornger would've generated something like 500 reports in today's reporting system, so it's possible that on that one day alone, we could've overtaken the total for all of April 2011. Hailstone also mentioned the 4/1 report/ground truth ratio during the NC outbreak. It would be interesting to map out how this ratio changes for different parts of the country.

Here are a few other interesting things to consider ...

1. There has been 1 tornado report west of Oklahoma City all of this year. Hey, that must be another record! A record low, that is. What does that mean? All the other reports have been east of Oklahoma City, where the population density greatly increases. Even though the SPC's watches and NWS's warnings have been very impressive, people still died due to i) bad luck and ii) failure to heed the warnings.

2. One factor that affects reports is population density, the other may be the standards of the NWS in documenting tornadoes. I was on the NWS Milwaukee site reading about how the WI outbreak was also the most reports for April on record. When looking over the chart of path length, path width, etc., it seemed that the radar is of huge helping when picking out the short-lived tornadoes. I commend the NWS for becoming really, really good at documenting all the events that occurred, but with an increasing rigor to put every single event in the history books, it seems that the saying "records were meant to be broken" was never truer.

2 comments:

  1. The total is up to 573 through 4/24/11 and it looks like that total will continue to rise with Mod risks for today, tues, and Wed as well as another potent system for the end of the week.

    I would like to note that this discussion, which was originally astrixed due to obvious flaws in tornado reporting, was meant to spark interest in the topic as well as how documenting severe weather events is done (right or wrong). It however was not meant to turn into a classic Climatology type battle between CSU's Bill Gray and MIT's Kerry Emanuel at AMS...lol...You know that I agree with both Jake and you on all of these points, but sure enough The Press (TWC, NWS, Accuweather, etc.) is going to have a field day with this month's severe weather. I'm positive even the big guns like Doswell, Tripoli, Markowski, etc. will put their two sense in as well. It is going to be talked about whether we like it, agree/disagree or not. So embrace the feeding frenzy and editorial sprawl (not Sprawl 2, ;] ) because it is relevant, it is historically significant (regardless of the flaws or lack of historical data), and it is WHAT WE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT!!! :)

    It's just a shame that such an incredibly active month (16 of the 24 days thus far with tornado reports, 8 days with over 25 reports) had to fall this early in the season before most of you were able/willing to chase due to school, distance, attitude, or new houses...cough cough...Hopefully the season will remain extremely active through June and you guys will be able to get out alot during AOS chase class.

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