There is no question that tornado counts have soared over the past thirty years. It’s not necessarily that we are having more tornadoes, but it’s just that we know about nearly every one of them now. Doppler radar tells National Weather Service survey teams exactly where to go to find where tornadoes may have occurred, for one thing. Excellent spotter networks and armadas of storm chasers monitor nearly every thunderstorm that could potentially produce a tornado.
We just don’t miss many tornadoes anymore, even in the most remote locations. In addition, families of tornadoes that may have been counted as one twister are meticulously broken into individual tornadoes because of exhaustive post storm surveys.
There have already been 1390 tornadoes officially in the U.S. this year. That total only goes through July 31st. Unofficially, another 145, 133 and 28 tornado reports were logged in August, September and October of this year. Some of these were multiple reports of the same tornado. Generally, the actual totals will be about 65% of the preliminary figures, so we can expect about 175 of those reports to translate into actual tornadoes. So we are probably somewhere around 1565 tornadoes for the year.
The ten year average number of tornadoes in November and December is around 100, so we should finish the year around 1665. So the record of 1819 tornadoes reported in 2004 is probably safe.
On a monthly note, the 460 tornadoes observed this past May is the third most in May and the third most in any month.
So, 2008 will go down as one of the most active and deadliest tornado seasons on record in the United States.
