Day 108: Tornado Deficit

Posted by pmarsh on 18 Apr 2010 | 0 comments

With the chance of severe weather returning to the eastern two-thirds of the United States by mid-week, I thought tonight I’d post about this year’s severe weather to date.  If you’ve thought this year has been unusually devoid of severe weather, you’d be correct.

The image above was created by the Storm Prediction Center’s Warning Coordination Meteorologist, Greg Carbin.  It displays the 2010 tornadoes (in red) and 2005-2009 tornado averages in grey.  The vertical bars represent the daily occurrence of tornadoes (2005-2009 in grey; 2010 in red; axis on the left) and the more horizontal bars indicate the running totals (axis on the right).  A quick glance quickly captures how far below recent history we are, with less than 100 preliminary tornado reports through 15 April.  To put it into perspective, the recent average through 15 April is 415!  It isn’t very often that by mid April, January was is one of your bigger tornado producing months!  As we continue to head into peak tornado season, this gap continues to widen for each day that passes without tornado occurrences.

Late this week, the atmosphere may support tornadoes again through portions of the central United States.  I’ll have more on this throughout the week.