Has tornado season gotten worse this year than previous 3yrs?

Am I hallucinating here?

The recent tornadoes killed 21 people in Carolina were very powerful. they ripped the whole house off the concrete foundation.

yes it is--the weather guy on the news tonite said the numbers
are way up --way--way up..

It's not hard for a tornado to rip a house off its foundations, especially if it knocks down a tree and uses that or something else as a broom.

You can't learn anything useful about weather over such a short period as three years - you need to look over longer periods. The National Weather Service has long used 30 years as their interval for giving "normal" conditions.

It's probably too early in the season to gather meaningful statistics to compare against prior years.

It sure seems like it though. Fatalities seem to be up at the least.

Worse then ever? Probably not. A bad year, sure seems to be, but then the last few years I've been in Wyoming not the south, so I didn't really pay attention. 2005 was a really bad hurricane season which Katrina and Rita, so many hurricanes they ran out of names. People expected that to continue, but since then the numbers have slacked off. Weather is a chaotic system, you'll have spikes of high and low hurricanes, tornadoes and temperatures.

Good years and bad years. There has always been cycles and always will be. Either way, hope for the best but plan for the worst.

No, tornados and storms this year appear to be within statistical norms. Reporting/news coverage seems to be way up. It reminds me when the news groups called 2001 "The Year of the Shark". In fact, shark attacks numbered the same as in previous years.

The comparison to hurricanes is useful. They ran out of names in 2005. However, only 1 hurricane his the US coast in 2006 and 2007 and that storm was only a cat 1.

The weather is always variable here in Texas. It can change frequently and sometimes violently. The reality is that it's springtime and I'm in Texas. Storms happen.

- Brian

P.S. - Keep watching the skies. Pay attention to local forecasts. Learn the weather pattern in your localities and try to enjoy the ride.

Storms, hurricanes and tornadoes are all heat engines. They are powered by heat differentials. If the atmosphere heated up evenly there wouldn't be any storms.

The warming of both the sea surface and air will not necessarily mean more storms. But when cold northern air travels south the interface between the cold and hot will be alive with storms.

As this interface shifts northward I would expect to see the band where storms are common to shift north also. A cyclonic storm, essentially a hurricane, was seen in the mid-west not long ago. This is highly unusual.

This may be the trend of the future as extreme weather, normally seasonal and mostly confined to coastal areas and well known belts of activity, becomes less seasonal and less confined to their normal areas.