Abstract
Tornado outbreak climatology is constantly evolving. Modern research highlights the current trends in tornado outbreak activity using the Storm Prediction Center’s tornado database, which dates back to 1950. Here, digitized tornado records over the period of 1880–1989 are used to create a historical climatology of tornado outbreaks. Four hundred and sixty-two unique clusters are identified encompassing more than 4500 tornadoes. The spatial distribution of these clusters follows an L-shaped pattern, with tornadoes extending from Iowa to Oklahoma to Georgia consistent with modern tornado outbreak climatology. The historical tornado clusters show significant upward trends in the total number of clusters, tornadoes, and casualties by decade. Additionally, tornado clusters show similar upward trends seasonally and diurnally. Most clusters occur in March, April, and May and start in the early afternoon hours. The results within this manuscript are consistent with current trends detected in the modern tornado record. Future research will look to combine historical and modern tornado records to develop a more complete climatology of clusters since 1880.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Code availability
All code used in this research was developed using the open-sourced program, R. Graphics were made with the ggplot2 (Wickham 2017) and tmap (Tennekes 2017) framework. The code for this research is available on GitHub (https://github.com/zschroder/HistoricalTornadoes) and the STORGIS data set is available from the second author, TF, upon reasonable request.
References
Anderson-Frey AK, Richardson YP, Dean AR, Thompson RL, Smith BT (2018) Near-storm environments of outbreak and isolated tornadoes. Weather Forecast 33(5):1397–1412. https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-18-0057.1
Brooks HE, Carbin GW, Marsh PT (2014) Increased variability of tornado occurrence in the United States. Science 346(6207):349–352. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1257460
Cheng V, Arhonditsis G, Sills D, Gough W, Auld H (2015) A Bayesian modelling framework for tornado occurrences in North America. Nat Commun 6:6599. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7599
Coleman TA, Dixon PG (2014) An objective analysis of tornado risk in the United States. Weather Forecast 29(2):366–376
Concannon P, Brooks HE, Doswell CA (2000) Climatological risk of strong and violent tornadoes in the United States. In: 2nd Conference on environmental applications
Corfidi JJL Stephen F, Weiss SJ (1974) P 5.2 the super outbreak: outbreak of the century
Dean AR (2010) P2.19 An analysis of clustered tornado events. In: 25th Conference on severe local storms
DelGenio AD, Yao MS, Jonas J (2007) Will moist convection be stronger in a warmer climate? Geophys Res Lett 34(16):1. https://doi.org/10.1029/2007gl030525
Diffenbaugh NS, Scherer M, Trapp RJ (2013) Robust increases in severe thunderstorm environments in response to greenhouse forcing. Proc Natl Acad Sci 110:16361–16366. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1307758110
Elsner JB, Elsner SC, Jagger TH (2015) The increasing efficiency of tornado days in the United States. Clim Dyn 45(3–4):651–659
Elsner JB, Fricker T, Berry WD (2018) A model for U.S. tornado casualties involving interaction between damage path estimates of population density and energy dissipation. J Appl Meteorol Climatol 57:2035–2046
Elsner JB, Fricker T, Schroder Z (2018) Increasingly powerful tornadoes in the United States. Geophys Res Lett 46:392–398. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL080819
Finley JP (1882) Report on the character of six hundred tornadoes
Fricker T (2019) Evaluating tornado casualty rates in the United States. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xsnuy
Fricker T, Elsner JB, Mesev V, Jagger TH (2017) A dasymetric method to spatially apportion tornado casualty counts. Geomat Natural Hazards Risk 1:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/19475705.2017.1386724
Fricker T, Wells T, Allemeier JT, Baxter A (2022) Digitizing and geocoding historical records to improve an understanding of tornado climatology. The Professional Geographer (Forthcoming)
Fuhrmann CM, Konrad CE II, Kovach MM, McLeod JT, Schmitz WG, Dixon PG (2014) Ranking of tornado outbreaks across the United States and their climatological characteristics. Weather Forecast 29:684–701
Gagan JP, Gerard A, Gordon J (2010) A historical and statistical comparison of “Tornado Alley’’ to “Dixie Alley.’’. Nat Weather Dig 34:145–155
Galway JG (1977) Some climatological aspects of tornado outbreaks. Mon Weather Rev 105:477–484
Galway JG (1981) Ten famous tornado outbreaks. Weatherwise 34(3):100–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/00431672.1981.9931955
Galway JG, Pearson A (1981) Winter tornado outbreaks. Mon Weather Rev 109(5):1072–1080. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0493(1981)109<1072:wto>2.0.co;2
Gensini V, Ashley W (2011) Climatology of potentially severe convective environments from the North American Regional Reanalysis. Electron J Severe Storms Meteorol 6:1–40. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-018-0048-2
Gensini V, Brooks H (2018) Spatial trends in United States tornado frequency. NPJ Clim Atmos Sci 1:1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-018-0048-2
Grazulis TP (1990a) Significant Tornadoes, 1880–1989: a chronology of events. Significant Tornadoes, 1880–1989, Environmental Films. http://books.google.com/books?id=E8hFAAAAYAAJ
Grazulis TP (1990b) Significant Tornadoes, 1880-1989: Discussion and analysis. Significant Tornadoes, 1880–1989, Environmental Films. http://books.google.com/books?id=E8hFAAAAYAAJ
Kelly DL, Schaefer JT, McNulty RP, Dowsell C, Abbey RF (1978) An augmented tornado climatology. Mon Weather Rev 106(8):1172–1183
Lu M, Tippett M, Lall U (2015) Changes in the seasonality of tornado and favorable genesis conditions in the central United States. Geophys Res Lett 42(10):4224
Moore T (2017) On the temporal and spatial characteristics of tornado days in the United States. Atmos Res 184:1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2016.10.007
Moore TW (2017) Annual and seasonal tornado activity in the united states and the global wind oscillation. Clim Dyn 50(11–12):4323–4334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3877-5
Moore TW (2018) Annual and seasonal tornado trends in the contiguous United States and its regions. Int J Climatol 38:1582–1594. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5285
Moore TW (2019) Seasonal frequency and spatial distribution of tornadoes in the united states and their relationship to the el niño/southern oscillation. Ann Am Assoc Geogr 109(4):1033–1051. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1511412
Moore TW (2021) Decreasing trends in consecutive-day tornado events in the United States. Int J Climatol 41:6530–6540. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.7210
Moore TW, DeBoer TA (2019) A review and analysis of possible changes to the climatology of tornadoes in the united states. Progress Phys Geogr: Earth Environ 43(3):365–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309133319829398
Moore TW, Fricker T (2020) Tornadoes in the USA are concentrating on fewer days, but their power dissipation is not. Theoret Appl Climatol 142(3–4):1569–1579. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03402-1
Moore TW, Clair JMS, McGuire MP (2021) Climatology and trends of tornado-favorable atmospheric ingredients in the united states. Ann Am Assoc Geogr 112(2):331–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.1910479
Schroder Z (2021) Regional SST and SLP conditions related to tornado ’outbreak’ environments 15 days later. https://doi.org/10.31223/x5bs6q
Schroder Z, Elsner JB (2019) Quantifying relationships between environmental factors and power dissipation on the most prolific days in the largest tornado “outbreaks”. Int J Climatol. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.6388
Schroder Z, Elsner JB (2021) Estimating ’outbreak’-level tornado counts and casualties from environmental variables. Weather Climate Soc. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-20-0130.1
Taszarek M, Allen JT, Brooks HE, Pilguj N, Czernecki B (2021) Differing trends in united states and European severe thunderstorm environments in a warming climate. Bull Am Meteor Soc 102(2):E296–E322. https://doi.org/10.1175/bams-d-20-0004.1
Tennekes M (2017) tmap: Thematic Maps. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tmap, r package version 1.10
Tippett MK, Cohen JE (2016) Tornado outbreak variability follows Taylor’s power law of fluctuation scaling and increases dramatically with severity. Nat Commun 7:10668. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10668
Tippett MK, Lepore C, Cohen JE (2016) More tornadoes in the most extreme US tornado outbreaks. Science 354(6318):1419–1423. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah7393
Trapp R (2014) On the significance of multiple consecutive days of tornado activity. Mon Weather Rev 142:1452–1459. https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00347.1
Trapp RJ, Diffenbaugh NS, Brooks HE, Baldwin ME, Robinson ED, Pal JS (2007) Changes in severe thunderstorm environment frequency during the 21st century caused by anthropogenically enhanced global radiative forcing. Proc Natl Acad Sci (USA) 104(50):19719–19723. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0705494104
Wickham H (2017) tidyverse: Easily Install and Load ’Tidyverse’ Packages. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyverse, r package version 1.1.1
Funding
The authors declare that no financial support was available for this work including but not limited to funds, grants, and other support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
There is no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Schroder, Z., Fricker, T. Expanding the historical "outbreak" climatology between 1880 and 1989. Nat Hazards 117, 3273–3285 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05986-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05986-z