So the other day I posted a diary recapping severe weather for the month of March. I made a bigger deal than I should have about the amount of reports of wind damage/hail/tornadoes that came in, noting that the month was slightly above average.
Well, I closed the diary with the following:
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, there's a good chance for severe weather across the midwest and southeast, so the month will have at least a head start in catching up and adding to the year's totals.
If I'm truly a "weather jinx" as some call me, someone needs to shut me the hell up. Jump the squiggle.
SPC severe weather reports map. Blue dots = Wind ... Green dots = Hail ... Red dots = Tornado
As of 4:04PM Central Time, there were 1,303 reports of severe weather yesterday, mostly damage. Think about that. 1,303. The average amount of severe weather reports in the month of April (10 year average 2001-2010) is 3076. That's for the entire month, including all the wind, all the hail, and all the tornadoes over a span of 30 days. According to the NWS office in Forth Worth, Texas, yesterday had one of the largest severe weather outbreaks (in terms of reports) ever recorded by the National Weather Service. That's pretty big.
We had 1,303 in one day. This was an incredible cold front that had a ton of energy to work with. It sparked off a long line of storms from Cleveland, OH to middle Texas, and all the way out to Philadelphia, PA and central Florida.
Of this incredible number of reports, there were 1181 reports of wind damage, 89 reports of large hail, and 25 reported tornadoes. The winds did what you'd expect -- down trees and power lines, damage buildings, and screw up cars and stuff lying around. The hail was a lesser threat since the storms were more linear than individual, but there were some embedded cells that were able to produce some pretty impressive hail, including one report of baseball sized hail in Resaca, GA.
The tornado reports, as I always caution, can be redundant. Of the 25 reports, some of the damage wasn't caused by a tornado at all, and it's common for the same tornado to be logged numerous times as its own event. The NWS has survey crews all across the southeast today, taking notes and determining what caused the damage and, if it was a tornado, how strong it was. Here are the reports as of right now, and I've removed some of the obvious redundancy:
Whelen Springs, AR -- EF 1
Fouke, AR -- Not rated yet
Wickliffe, KY -- EF 1
Kevil, KY -- EF 2
Greenville, KY -- Not yet rated
Hopkinsville, TN -- Not yet rated
Sugar Grove, TN -- EF 1
Dickson, TN -- Not yet rated
Coleman State, MS -- Not yet rated
Franklin, TN -- Not yet rated
La Vergne, TN -- Not yet rated
Georgetown, LA -- Not yet rated
Jena, LA -- Not yet rated
St. Joseph, LA -- EF 2
Ville Platte, LA -- Not yet rated
Braxton, MS -- Not yet rated
Avera, MS -- Not yet rated
Ararat, NC -- Not yet rated
Eastman, GA -- EF 2
Tallahassee, FL -- Funnel cloud, no touchdown.
Here in Mobile, AL, the storms were a little more modest. We had a ton of rain, a ton of really cool lightning, and winds that spiked at 20MPH here on campus. A few miles down the road, there was a 53 MPH gust at the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency. As usual, I took a video of the storm as it came through.
I've put in a request with the NCDC for the archived radar imagery from the event (I didn't take screenshots, d'oh) here in Mobile, but it takes forever for them to send it. Just picture a wall of red moving slowly to the east like it's on Space Invaders.
If you have any damage or pictures from the event, share them! Don't forget that if you have damage, please report it to the National Weather Service so it can be properly documented.