Monday, June 16, 2008
Weather columnist Kevin Myatt: Deaths from tornadoes could be on path to set grim record this year
Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.
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2008 could easily become the deadliest year for tornadoes in the United States in 34 years.
Wednesday's deaths in Iowa and Kansas pushed the year's tornado death toll to 118.
There were 366 fatalities from tornadoes in 1974, a year that included the massive April 3-4 "Super Outbreak" over the eastern half of the country. Since then, only two years have topped 100 tornado deaths: 122 in 1984 and 130 in 1998.
Nearly half of this year's death toll occurred before the first week of February had ended -- 58 died in a Feb. 5 outbreak across the South.
Tornado activity typically hits a lull in summer, as the stronger upper-level winds that can spin thunderstorm updrafts retreat into Canada.
Fall, though, sometimes brings a secondary spike in tornadoes, as the jet stream returns from Canada, bringing cold air masses to clash with leftover heat from summer. Also, some tropical systems moving inland spawn scores of twisters.
Outside the February-June period, when severe weather typically starts near the Gulf Coast and slowly shifts northward, November is the nation's deadliest month for tornadoes.
A little more than half the year is left, though the historically most dangerous period for tornadoes in the U.S. will soon be past. But it would take only one major tornado in a populated area to drive the nation's death toll to a level not seen since the year Nixon resigned.
