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A Record Year for Tornadoes
Mon May 30, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. The year 2004 saw more tornadoes than in any year for which we have records. Who better to ask why than Joe Schaefer, Director of NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, in Norman, Oklahoma.
Last year there were 1722 tornadoes. What’s so amazing about that is the previous record was 1,424. This is over 300 more tornadoes this year than in any other year before.
So, why were there so many tornadoes? I heard one researcher say that it was totally based on the amount of hurricanes.
Uh, not really. If we subtract out the hurricane tornadoes, it would have been probably a record year anyhow. Because there were 300, approximately 320 hurricane associated tornadoes. And we were about 310, 320 above the previous record. So, it was not hurricane related. It was really a strange year. The first five and a half months had very, very light tornado activity. And then the weather pattern loft changed, and the winds went from Westerly to Southwesterly across the midsection of the country. Tornadoes started to form in the Northern Plains and that’s where the tornado activity really was maximized. Essentially between highway 70 and highway 80. Oklahoma had less tornado activity than normal. This stretch across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Northern Missouri, had an excessive amount of tornadoes.
Is there anything that you see in the patterns so far that lead you to believe it’s going to be a stronger year or a weaker year?
Right now we’re really not much better than saying what the climatology is. And I know I would of missed real bad last year on that. But we keep looking for and exploring various climatological signals and hopefully we’re going to find one of these days that has some predictive capabilities.
The Weather Notebook is produced with support from Subaru of America. Find us online at www.weathernotebook.org.
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