2008 Year in Tornadoes

[Darrin Rasberry]

You just jinxed us. Therefore it will likely be one of the worst years ever, due to one of Murphy's Laws corollary.

Murphy's Laws

1. If anything can go wrong, it will.
2. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong.
3. If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
4. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
5. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
6. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
7. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
8. Mother nature is a *****.

Addition to Murphy's Laws

In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right ... something is wrong.

Gumperson's Law

The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability.

In particular it seems our severe weather season will be messed up by Gumperson's Law above. Oh, and I haven't found it yet, but I know there is a law that says if you state something will happen, it won't.

Oh, let me add, (of course there is the chance you could be right), that rather than a record year it could be an early, and short year for tornadoes too. We know what is behind door number 1 & 2, but what are the numbers behind doors 3 thru 12? Weather tends to average itself out, and if you have a big burst you often then have a lull. Guess I haven't actually thought about your stats - only to joke, but if I were to guess I would say we have an active early season pattern which is early when looking at climatology. The season tends to start in this area, then move to Florida area, eventually to Tx/Ok then further north generally speaking. My fear would be a pattern change within a month that would cause all this to break down and that is typical, if it hasn't happened already.

And to add to the melee, I'll toss in THIS (all in good humor of course):

The Mother Nature Don't Care Bout Us Law: "No matter what we say or do, wish for or predict, Mother Nature will do her own seemingly random dance until we humans are smart enough to know all of the countless variables."

Although Mother Nature's mighty phallic symbols will likely tend toward the statistics in the past, statistics are only a human tool used to analyze the frequency of phenomena in order to make predictions about future outcomes under similar circumstances, with certain high and low counts representing confidence intervals calculated from the idea of "standard deviation."

Of course we can feel like we're pretty confident in saying "the stats show that there will be x tornadoes this calendar year, with a standard deviation of y tornadoes [thus producing a confident range interval of tornadoes that will occur in a calendar year], thus since z tornadoes have happened already, the rest of the year will likely see x-z tornadoes, give or take a small number, because the statistics show how unlikely it will be to proceed like this for the rest of the year." Of course our statistics mark years because we do; if we guessed by the statistics for only a six-week deep winter period, then after the early January outbreak we could, by the stats book, reasonably have concluded with an incredible amount of statistical confidence that there would not be another outbreak until beyond the middle of February.

But, despite the man-made chances, an even larger midwinter outbreak occurred almost exactly a month later just south and east of the same area.

Mother Nature won't be listening to us dinky humans. Since there is, by all current knowledge, no year-long-lasting, undetectable, limited pool of energy from which tornadoes subtract, there's no way to tell, either way, how this season will be (although all joking aside I'm sure everyone here knows that in their heart of hearts). The U.S. could bust out so bad that Canada ends up with a higher count than we do for the rest of the year; we could see tons of tornadoes, but in limited situations where (thankfully) nothing gets higher than an EF-1 and nothing stays on the ground for more than a few seconds; we could see a Tornado Alley outbreak on par with the Super Outbreak, with snail-paced EF-5's giving all of us incredible video and doing no more damage than the hair pulled out of crop insurance executive's heads; there could be another Twelve Days of H-E-Doublehockeysticks like in 2003 with large twisters terrorizing Tornado Alley and killing dozens, if not hundreds.

We could have the best season ever with harmless ranch-trotters looking pretty for us; we could have the worst season ever with outbreak after outbreak in the Southeastern U.S., complete with 70+MPH bullets through the hills at night which cripple stormchasing efforts to both warn communities and capture worthwhile film or data (this is my own prediction). Or it can be business as usual, somewhere in between all of these extremes, with good tornadoes here and there in SLGTs and the routine yearly mod- or high- bust here in Iowa.

But if there ARE less tornadoes this year than average from here on out, I'm sure it will be for myriad reasons, most unknown thus far to humans, none of which revolve around mother nature making us mathematicians a little less O/C by following the statistical norm.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Just to clarify the above post a little:

There's an additional force in statistics (i.e. what we pure math guys regard as "guesswork with confidence that's also guessed") called "conditional probability." It states that GIVEN event A, the probability of event B following it has, in correlation, been __%. For example the chances of me dying today are very low, but GIVEN that I drove my car straight into an EF5 tornado, the chances of my death increase dramatically. We can, for instance, go through the rare years of, say, 100-150 tornadoes by what's looking like at least the third week of February, collect all the data (however limited), and come up with a statistical likelihood based only on the other years with as many tornadoes as we've had so far.

Unless this is the only year near this calibur, or unless there's been only one or two years with a neighborhood of this many tornadoes in the past, we could hopefully observe a trend (perhaps born from similar situations we humans do not yet understand, but which all happened before or during early-outbreak years to cause the tornadoes) and come up with a guess more reasonable than looking at year-long statistics. Of course, even in that case, there may not be a correlation between early outbreaks and the number of post-winter tornadoes, or there may be an incredible correlation - but, the unknown conditions which exploded this year could be entirely different. That's the fun in statistics with subjects like nature, which have causation man cannot yet fathom - should other early outbreaks strongly tend toward low later tornado counts, say, and this year tends toward an unusually higher than average post-winter count instead, it will show there is a big chance there's something very important to long-term tornado forecasting lingering in this year's weather!

 

[Alex Lamers]

I got to thinking about how everyone always cites 1999 as a big tornado year, and 1974 with the "Super Outbreak" and about how they also happened to be La Nina years (myself included ). So I decided to do my homework and see if this seemed true in general. Does La Nina mean a big tornado year? I offer you these nuggets:

• 1999 and 2000 both had La Nina conditions in the spring months. In fact one could argue that 2000 started off in stronger La Nina conditions, albeit just barely. While 1999 saw over 1300 tornadoes, 2000 didn't even hit 900 tornadoes on the year.
• 1999 was an active year for tornadoes, but 1998 had even more tornadoes, and it was an El Nino year!
• The only other time in the 90s that the ~1300 tornado threshold was hit was in 1992, an El Nino year.

Also I took a look at the Oklahoma statistics. I looked at only the MAM (March April May) and AMJ (April May June) Nino conditions and went back to 1950, tallying whether or not we had above average or below average tornado counts in Oklahoma for La Nina, Neutral and El Nino conditions. (For neutral I considered the sum of the SST anomalies in the Nino 3.4 region for both periods being greater than -1 but less than 1 to be neutral).

What I found was that in La Nina years, 60% of the time Oklahoma experiences below average tornado counts (45 or less). 87% of the time Oklahoma experiences below average or near average tornado counts (60 or less). In fact there were only two instances where a La Nina coincided with an above average tornado count in Oklahoma...1955 and 1999. The record low tornado count in Oklahoma occurred in 1988 (17 tornadoes) and that was a year in which we were in La Nina conditions by mid-Spring (changing from neutral).

That all being said...if you're for a big tornado year...it should be pretty encouraging the way the season has started.

AJL

 

[Simon Brewer]

2004 was a record due to combination of active late May/early June and an insane amount of Hurricane related tornadoes on the East Coast. 2004 was on par with 2003 until the active tornado-producing hurricane season.

Big tornado year? Depends if you're looking at a big tornado year for storm chasers in the Great Plains or just pure numbers of tornadoes for the entire U.S.; 2002 was what I would consider below average for the great plains, but there were some huge outbreaks east of the Mississippi River. Sure there were some big days: April 7th, May 4th-7th, and of course the 'dream-day' June 23, but 2002 was generally not very good for Plains chasers.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

I buy it, but what are the statistics of "strong" F2+/EF2+ tornadoes for Nino/Nina/not much of anything years? Any correlation? Not trolling/baiting - I actually don't know the answer to this

I got to thinking about how everyone always cites 1999 as a big tornado year, and 1974 with the "Super Outbreak" and about how they also happened to be La Nina years (myself included ). So I decided to do my homework and see if this seemed true in general. Does La Nina mean a big tornado year? I offer you these nuggets:

• 1999 and 2000 both had La Nina conditions in the spring months. In fact one could argue that 2000 started off in stronger La Nina conditions, albeit just barely. While 1999 saw over 1300 tornadoes, 2000 didn't even hit 900 tornadoes on the year.
• 1999 was an active year for tornadoes, but 1998 had even more tornadoes, and it was an El Nino year!
• The only other time in the 90s that the ~1300 tornado threshold was hit was in 1992, an El Nino year.

Also I took a look at the Oklahoma statistics. I looked at only the MAM (March April May) and AMJ (April May June) Nino conditions and went back to 1950, tallying whether or not we had above average or below average tornado counts in Oklahoma for La Nina, Neutral and El Nino conditions. (For neutral I considered the sum of the SST anomalies in the Nino 3.4 region for both periods being greater than -1 but less than 1 to be neutral).

What I found was that in La Nina years, 60% of the time Oklahoma experiences below average tornado counts (45 or less). 87% of the time Oklahoma experiences below average or near average tornado counts (60 or less). In fact there were only two instances where a La Nina coincided with an above average tornado count in Oklahoma...1955 and 1999. The record low tornado count in Oklahoma occurred in 1988 (17 tornadoes) and that was a year in which we were in La Nina conditions by mid-Spring (changing from neutral).

That all being said...if you're for a big tornado year...it should be pretty encouraging the way the season has started.

AJL