Tornadic storms during Dust Bowl Years??

joel ewing

EF5
Joined
Oct 25, 2004
Messages
577
Location
Tucson, Arizona
(Mods, I rarely start new threads....please move where appropriate..thanks).

I have often wondered if there were many tornadic storms during the "Dust-Bowl" periods in the 1930's within the "primary" tornado alley (Dakotas thru Tex. panhandle). I believe one would naturally associate such bone-dry conditions with very little storm activity, but this may not necessarily be the case.
I've also often wished if my grandparents and my two parents, who were raised in central / northeast Nebraska during that time were alive...so I could ask them. Does anybody know of any records anywhere that could shed light on this?? Thank You...Joel
 
I found a website that refers to weather in Nebraska during the 1930's:

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_02.html

There are references to temperature extremes, floods and even tornadoes on that website. I would think that with the lack of moisture there's little or no storm development like we normally get these days. I saw maps on other websites that indicated a lack of moisture in the Rockies extending into the Great Plains in the 1930s.

About the only storm images I could think of is dust devils or dust storms. It wasn't until the latter part of the 1930's that farmers were able to control the erosion caused by the dust storms. That is when the weather patterns seems to return to normal.

I was born in the 1950's so I have no memories of those Dust Bowl years. I'm sure my mom and grand parents rememberd those years. They all have passed away, I only have their journals and family memories to remember those years. LJK.
 
I know that 1930 was right right at the beginning of the dust bowl and central Oklahoma wasn't nearly as effected as the panhandle, but Bethany, OK got hit by a devastating tornado on November 11 that year, killing 23 people - the 9th deadliest single tornado event in Oklahoma history. The house I grew up in was heavily damaged and rebuilt after the storm.

In looking for information on this, I found several sites that referenced "blizzards, tornadoes, floods, followed by drought and dust storms." So it looks like there were some, but I can't find any site with an actual number. The NWS only has data back to 1950.

By chance I watched a History Channel presentation (Black Blizzard) on the Dust Bowl just a night or two ago.

The actual numbers were that the dust bowl area was getting less than half of their annual rainfall each year of the event (avg. 20", they were getting 9-10"). People I knew growing up that had lived through it used to say that the only rain they got just knocked the dust out of the air in between wind gusts. Some said when it rained, it rained mud.

If I understand the meteorology and climatology correctly, the dust bowl was a perfect storm. The prairie grasses had held the soils for thousands of years and were supremely drought tolerant. When the US government opened the area to farming, they had no idea that they were opening the door to the largest man-made ecological disaster in the history of North America. Wheat replaced the grasses and wheat is not drought tolerant.

Then (although they never say it directly that I heard) a persistent la nina combined with a significant and rapid advance in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation at around the same time, turning the low-level Atlantic Jet to the south, instead of pulling the moisture up into the great plains as we are used to seeing. The result was an extended and significant drought. The dust itself exacerbated the event by blocking some of the insolation needed to evaporate what moisture there was present. In addition, the native grasses would allow more moisture to be held and later released in the form of evaporation. The dead wheat held no such moisture. As the dust and dirt blew up and fell repeatedly, it was pulverized into a fine, talc-like dust that needed barely a breath of a breeze to become airborne. The May 11 dust storm of 1934 carried 300 million tons of dirt - 6 tons for every man, woman, and child in the US at the time - and reached the Atlantic coast. It was this storm that turned day into night in Washington DC and New York that politicians finally got busy solving the man-made issues that led to the Dust Bowl.

One of the best quotes from the History Channel show was from an author/soil specialist when asked what caused the Dust Bowl: "Hubris."
 
I looked through the state-by-state index in Significant Tornadoes. This only includes tornadoes which are rated F2+ and/or tornadoes that caused fatalities. For the period 1930-1939, here's the count per state:

Oklahoma: 100
Kansas: 90
Texas: 102
Nebraska: 67

There's an F5 listed in Garden County, NE on April 26, 1938 which killed 3 and tracked 25 miles. Description says: "A mile-wide tornado tracked NNE from 12m SW of Oshkosh. In the "Lone Star" section, a school was leveled and two entire farms were swept away. At the school, the teacher and students were outside watching the sky, but saw no funnel. The teacher's car and house then left the ground and the school disintegrated. Three students died and their bodies were carried a quarter mile. $25000."

On April 14, 1939, an F5 tornado tracked through Dewey, Woodward, Major, Woods, Alfalfa Counties in Oklahoma and into Barber County, Kansas. Description says: "A massive tornado or tornado family moved NE and NNE, sweeping away entire farms in sparsely populated NW Oklahoma. The funnel moved from the SE part of Vici, here 50 buildings were hit, to south of Waynoka, to SE of Alva, through Capron, and into Kansas, near Kiowa. Maximum intensity seemed to be reached about 5m S of Alva, where cars were carried for several hundred yards and homes were completely swept away. Most of the deaths were in this area, and at least one was in a car. The business district and SE side of Capron was torn apart, with 15 injuries. A freight train and the tornado both arrived in Capron at 12:15 AM, derailing eight cars."

Most of the Texas tornadoes were given a rating of F2 with a few F3 and F4s as well.
 
Nick,

How do those numbers compare with other significant drought-era years, such as the mid-50's or the late 80's?
 
Holy Smokes, I guess that school teacher must've been looking in the wrong direction when that F-5 snuck up behind her and made her school vaporize! Wow. Seriously, I wonder how that could've happened....she and her students not seeing any visible funnel? In trying to think that one thru...I surmised that perhaps during those "dust bowl" years..perhaps there wasn't much of a condensation funnel able to materialize. But...thinking the opposite....with so little moisture available....logic would tell me that there was nothing BUT dust within the surrounding fields...and that vortex should have been highly visible. Yet another mystery of the tornado.
 
joel ewing said:
Holy Smokes, I guess that school teacher must've been looking in the wrong direction when that F-5 snuck up behind her and made her school vaporize! Wow. Seriously, I wonder how that could've happened....she and her students not seeing any visible funnel? In trying to think that one thru...I surmised that perhaps during those "dust bowl" years..perhaps there wasn't much of a condensation funnel able to materialize. But...thinking the opposite....with so little moisture available....logic would tell me that there was nothing BUT dust within the surrounding fields...and that vortex should have been highly visible. Yet another mystery of the tornado.
Click to expand...

If the funnel was wide enough it might have been mistaken for this:

dust-bowl-cause-1.jpg


Although by 1938 I hope anyone living in the area knew the difference between what a duster looked like and what a tornado looked like.

Also, when it did rain, people often went outside to feel the rain on themselves. It was about the only time any of them could feel kinda clean. Perhaps the teacher and students were doing that and got caught up in a rain-wrapped tornado. I would kinda doubt that explanation because of the threat of extreme hail, but hey, stranger things have happened. Could just be that the teacher weren't none too bright...good teachers weren't exactly flocking to the area.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Steve Dedman wrote:


"Although by 1938 I hope anyone living in the area knew the difference between what a duster looked like and what a tornado looked like.

Also, when it did rain, people often went outside to feel the rain on themselves. It was about the only time any of them could feel kinda clean. Perhaps the teacher and students were doing that and got caught up in a rain-wrapped tornado. I would kinda doubt that explanation because of the threat of extreme hail, but hey, stranger things have happened. Could just be that the teacher weren't none too bright...good teachers weren't exactly flocking to the area."

Don't be so quick to dismiss the "brightness" of the teachers back in that place and time. The fact is: the teachers loyally and, often fearlessly, followed the literal frontier of civilazation very close at that time. There were many "normal schools" - which would later be called teachers' colleges - back in that place and time heavily sponsored and funded by the legislatures of states such as Kansas. Whether the specific teacher in question in this one anectdotal episode had any training or knowledge at all in terms of visual identification of severe weather, I have no idea. However, it is well known that the improvement in death tolls due to severe weather closely parralleled the improvement in communications, namely radio. You probably have absolutely no evidence whether the teacher in question had ANY access to radio communication then or not. So, don't blame anything on a "dumb teacher" in 1938.
 
Nick Smith said:
There's an F5 listed in Garden County, NE on April 26, 1938 which killed 3 and tracked 25 miles. Description says: "A mile-wide tornado tracked NNE from 12m SW of Oshkosh. In the "Lone Star" section, a school was leveled and two entire farms were swept away. At the school, the teacher and students were outside watching the sky, but saw no funnel. The teacher's car and house then left the ground and the school disintegrated. Three students died and their bodies were carried a quarter mile. $25000."
Click to expand...

Also back in those days how familiar were people with tornadoes. I'm sure just like most everyone in public thinks now that a tornado is a cylindrical shaped vortex. I'm sure they could have mistaken the mile wide wedge as just a cloud like a lot of people do. Her having being taught what a tornado looks like, could have had that image engraved into her head only to realize to late that the ominous cloud was indeed a tornado. Also I'm sure there were tons of dirt being ingested into the meso. Any chaser who has seen a storm go over an extremely dry freshly plowed field can attest to that one. Visibility becomes horrible and with the inflow jets of an F5 I am sure kicked up some hella dust. I would have loved to have seen that and how scary that wedge must have looked during those times.
 
Mike Johnston said:
You probably have absolutely no evidence whether the teacher in question had ANY access to radio communication then or not. So, don't blame anything on a "dumb teacher" in 1938.
Click to expand...

No, I don't have any hard evidence. But I do know that in rural NW Oklahoma in the 1930s less than half of the structures were electrifed. Further, most of those were concentrated in the larger towns and railhead areas. So I would put the probability of a one-room school in a tiny Nebraska hamlet in 1938 not having a radio turned on during class time at better than 90%.

Further, exactly who would have been putting out those warnings in 1938? The Weather Bureau was officially barred from issuing tornado warnings, and anyway the first warning didn't occur until 1948. There wasn't any such thing as storm spotters, and even if there were, how would they communicate what they saw in a manner that would reach an un-electrified one-room schoolhouse in the aforementioned tiny Nebraska hamlet in time for them to do anything?

Further, a teacher from any era that would have the kids outside looking at the sky in either situation - an approaching duster or an approaching tornadic supercell - would be in my opinion: DUMB. With the duster, the visibility would drop to less than 5 feet in a matter of seconds. In the dust bowl era it was not uncommon for people to perish in a dust storm literally feet from their front door. With the supercell, there would be lightning. Even if the school were in an area of the storm that didn't have high winds and large hail, the lightning is deadly. Taking the kids out in that would be DUMB.

There were plenty of great teachers in schools of the dust bowl era. There were also some real idiots. Why would it have been any different then than it is now?
 
Steve Dedman said:
Nick,

How do those numbers compare with other significant drought-era years, such as the mid-50's or the late 80's?
Click to expand...

For the period 1950-1959:

Kansas: 105
Nebraska: 60
Oklahoma: 133
Texas: 176

For 1988:

Kansas: 2 (3 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Nebraska: 1 (2 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Oklahoma: 1 (4 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Texas: 5 (21 in 1987 and 12 in 1989)
 
I would expect fewer tornadoes but not zero tornadoes. Low level moisture is just one ingredient (albeit an important one) needed for storms. Remember that temperatures were very high during those years. Perhaps an analogy would be the effects of mountains. Sure, they block low level warmth and moisture, and that can reduce the number and intensity of tornadic storms. But there have been times when the rest of the atmosphere trumped those inhibitions (31 May 1985).

It is also worth noting that other factors may have suppressed tornadoes. 500-mb ridges, blocking patterns, too.

These are my two cents, and merely based on thinking about the weather, not hard numbers of tornadoes or other evidence.

RST
 
Nick Smith said:
For the period 1950-1959:

Kansas: 105
Nebraska: 60
Oklahoma: 133
Texas: 176

For 1988:

Kansas: 2 (3 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Nebraska: 1 (2 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Oklahoma: 1 (4 in 1987 and 1 in 1989)
Texas: 5 (21 in 1987 and 12 in 1989)
Click to expand...

Interesting. The drought of the 50s was nowhere near as severe as the drought of the 30s, and farmers had learned to prevent soil erosion by that time. So the dust didn't kick up like it did in the 30s. Less solar reflectivity off of the dust. I'm thinking that the additional insolation available in the 50s allowed more major tornadogenesis to occur.

Also, I was interested to see what conditions were in place in the 3-4 days before the Alva event...IOW, had there been some previous rain to provide the moisture necessary for the isolated events? What had the winds been like? Had there been any dusters to kick up the dirt and block insolation? So after a good search I found the NSSL's Online Data Archives that go back to 1933 for the Alva station. There was rain on the 10th and 11th before the event on the 14th. So there was evaporative moisture to work with, and the dust would have been knocked down for a few days to provide clear skies. Further, the temperatures had been mild to downright chilly with lows into the upper 30s on the 12th and 13th and highs in the mid-70's. By evening of the 14th the dews had made it into the 60's, with a td max of 63 at 0400z on the 15th - an hour before the tornado got to Alva.

So it looks like the passage of a fairly stout high pressure system managed to pull some good moisture up from the gulf and allow the storms to fire.
 
Tornadoes during the Dust Bowl years

Thanks to all of you who replied to my question. I greatly appreciate it. If I can find more info on this in the future...I'd like to bring it to the forefront again. Joel
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top