Sunday, January 8, 2012

Tornado reports year in review

I queried the storm reports page from SPC, collecting the tornado reports for the last 7 years (2005-2011). I wanted to see what kind of year this was. I started by looking at (convective) days over the last 7 years (2557 days) where tornado reports were received (1186, or 46.4%).

When 30 or more tornado reports were received daily (sample size of 68), the yearly distribution was:
2011: 13
2010: 11
2009: 7
2008: 19
2007:  5
2006:  4
2005: 9

The top 6 report days over this period were:
27 APR 2011: 292
15 APR 2011: 146
12 MAR 2006: 140
16 APR 2011: 139
  5 FEB 2008: 131
25 MAY 2011: 127



So 2011 stands out both in terms of the maximum tornado report day on 27 APR (twice the reports of the next closest day), and 4 out of the top 6 report days. Quite the year for regional outbreaks, but does not beat 2008.

No comments:

Post a Comment