April 2011: A Historic Month For Tornadoes

This is not the type of record you want to break, but April of 2011 will probably end up with more tornadoes than any other month in modern day history. There were 871 tornado reports from last month! These are preliminary numbers, so more than likely the total will drop by one or two hundred.

Regardless, the previous record in April was 267 tornadoes which occurred in 1974. The highest number of of tornadoes for any month was May of 2003 (May is typically the most active month), where there were 558 tornado reports. So more than likely April 2011 will shatter all old tornado records.

Here is a map of all the reports:


The top five states were Alabama (144), Mississippi (115), North Carolina (86), Texas (64) and Tennessee (54). Virginia ended up with 35, which is an unusually high amount. You can find the entire list at the following link:

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/monthly/1104_summary.html

To put things into perspective, here is the map from May of 2003:


You can see that there significantly less tornadoes in the Mid-Atlantic, though it was a terrible month in the Midwest, especially around Kansas City and Springfield Missouri.