Tornado outbreak could set a record

WASHINGTON – The devastation is stunning – homes and lives shattered as the deadliest swarm of twisters in three years battered up to 15 states.

Ultimately, this could turn out to be among the top 10 three-day outbreaks for number of tornadoes, though experts can’t be sure until all the reports are sorted, said Greg Carbin of the federal Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

While tornadoes occur regularly, their power always shocks.

This time it was storms battering their way from Oklahoma to North Carolina, claiming at least 44 lives, almost half of those in North Carolina.

“A major storm system like this is going to happen every few years, usually in April or May,” Carbin said.

While May is the nation’s busiest month for twisters, they surge sharply in April, and most early spring tornadoes strike the Southeast and South Central states.

Indeed, the biggest tornado outbreak on record occurred April 3-4, 1974, when 147 confirmed twisters touched down in 13 states, claiming 310 lives in the United States and eight in Canada.

For about the past 30 years, the United States has averaged 135 tornadoes in April, the highest number being 266 in 1974, according to Jake Crouch of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

In these latest storms, the National Weather Service is investigating 267 preliminary tornado reports – including 97 in North Carolina on Saturday. But many of those will turn out to be duplicates, Carbin said. In this case, the storm system first developed over the Pacific and intensified when it got to the central Plains on Thursday where the dry western air collided with the warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico.

From there, the storms developed “pretty much as expected” over Oklahoma, Carbin said. Overnight, the storms merged into a fast-moving front crossing Arkansas and into the Mississippi River Valley, drawing fuel from daytime heating, striking on into Mississippi and Alabama and then into the Appalachians by Saturday morning. Then the storms again strengthened with daytime heat for the third day of tornadoes, hitting North Carolina hardest.

It’s that intersection of dry and wet air masses that sets up Tornado Alley, the region in the center of the country regularly pummeled by tornadoes.

Overall, from Thursday through Saturday, there were reports of funnel clouds in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.