Anything striking about the tornado count so far?

April is here now and we are in severe weather season. Traditionally for Kansas, these next two months can be some of the roughest weather we experience all year. Some years, the big stuff happens in May, while other years, most of the rough weather comes in mid to late April. A somewhat recent example of this is 2012 when there were twice as many tornadoes in April than May. One day in particular was bad, April 14th when we had nearly 40 tornado reports in just one day alone.

The last three weeks have been especially busy in the south with "high" risk areas for long track, violent tornadoes. Data is still considered preliminary as they try and sort through the exact number of tornadoes that occurred, but based on the count so far (currently at 208 across the country), there isn't anything alarming. There was one EF4 in Georgia with nearly half a dozen EF3 tornadoes in Alabama.

In the charts below, the red line represents the count for the year indicated, while the black solid line is the average. By the way, LSR stands for "Local Storm Reports" - basically what gets reported to the National Weather Service during an event.

 

2021 Count:

If we look back at the last 5 years of severe weather data, you're going to see no real connection to what happens through early April and what the remainder of the season will be like. In fact last year, the season ramped up quickly in late April, but then trailed off in summer and we finished the year below average. Kansas only had 17 tornadoes during the entire year. Crazy to say the least.

 

2020 Count

 

 

2019 Count

 

 

2018 Count

 

 

2017 Count

 

 

2016 Count

Severe weather is on hold for right now in much of the country, but there will be a few episodes coming up next week. They don't look like outbreaks of severe weather, but the humidity increases rather dramatically and that set us up for some storms to return. Details to come...