The April Tornadoes: Part 1

I'm back from a much needed vacation. My wife and I returned to Mississippi on Thursday, driving through some of the tornado damage in the Tuscaloosa, AL area on the way. Like me, I'm sure you are glad we are now in May and this will hopefully mean the active weather pattern we've seen this Spring will begin to quite down. Typically April is our biggest severe weather month of the year and certainly April 2011 was extremely active, perhaps even record-breaking. I want to stress that we can and do often still see severe weather in May, including tornadoes. Now isn't the time to let your guard down. In fact, in Mississippi, there is never a time to let your guard down when it comes to severe weather. You must be prepared; have plan you can put into action quickly.

I've got a lot of thoughts regarding the active April we had in the Deep South, including the historic tornado outbreak last week. I'll be sharing my thoughts in several posts this week.

Even though I was not here for last week's severe weather, I was working from 12 hours away keeping Twitter and Facebook updated. All the while watching several tornadic storms that were in my immediate area Virginia.

I've been trying to nail down exactly how many tornadoes have been confirmed in the month of April across Mississippi. Trying to do this has been problematic as there are 4 National Weather Service Forecast Offices that cover our state. Many of these offices are still doing storm surveys from last week's storms and the numbers are constantly changing. So, instead of trying to pin down an exact confirmed number right now, I can tell you that there were a total of 115 preliminary tornado reports in Mississippi. Again, these are not all confirmed, but that is still a very high number and a great majority of 115 will be confirmed.

This map shows the storm reports for Mississippi for April 2011.

Red dots = tornadoes; Blue dots = wind; Green dots = hail

Last year, there were 9 confirmed tornadoes in Mississippi. Also of note, in 2008 there were a total of 109 tornadoes...the most on record for Mississippi.¹ Is it possible that we could exceed the yearly record in one month??? Damage surveys are still being done, but we may know something on this by the end of the week.

The graphic above is from the National Severe Storms Laboratory. It shows the rotation tracks of the storms from April 27th. The bright oranges and reds are the most intense rotations.

As I mentioned earlier, I checked out some of the damage in Tuscaloosa while driving back to Mississippi. Much of downtown Tuscaloosa was blocked off and I could not see anything from my vantage point. I drove I-359, the loop around Tuscaloosa, and only went a mile or so off of I-20/59 to get to where the tornado crossed. Here are some of the pictures I took of that area. You can click on them to make them larger.

The interesting graphic below shows the life-long track of the supercell storm that produced multiple strong to violent tornadoes across Alabama, including the Tuscaloosa tornado. The storm developed back over Newton County, MS (bottom left of image) and tracked northeast across Alabama, northern George, and finally fell apart in western North Carolina! The cell lasted for more than 7 hours! Incredible!! I've seen long-lived cells such as this back in Oklahoma, but never in this part of the country. No doubt a lot of research will be done on this cell in the coming years.

As horrible and horrific as the damage is Tuscaloosa, I am a bit dismayed by the early reports that the town had been wiped off the map. This is certainly not the case. But, a violent EF-4 tornado going through a populated area is bad. There were many other areas that got hit in Alabama though, some of them even worse than Tuscaloosa. In fact, the NWS has rated a tornado that went through Hackleburg, AL an EF-5. Of course, by now you know the tornado that went through Smithville, MS was also rated EF-5. There were also several violent tornadoes in northern Alabama. A good friend we know from church has an aunt that lost her house, and her aunt's family next door was killed. We need to remember all of these hard hit areas in our prayers.

I'll share more thoughts later!

¹ - Even though 2008 presently holds the title for the most tornadoes in a year in the State of Mississippi, damage surveys are conducted differently in the 21st Century as compared to surveys 15-30 years ago. As a result, it is possible that tornado outbreaks in the 70s may have had more tornadoes than what is officially on record.

Eric - elaw@wlbt.com