METAR Mike's Blog: Historic April 14-16 Tornado Event

April started off active and still remains to be a very active month, but the 14th thru the 16th proved how active April is really wanting to be. 14th-16th has now became known as a historic tornado event for weather history.
Humorous Pictures

Let's have a peak.

Here are all of the reports for the 14th. Map of 110414_rpts's severe weather reports

The storm reports for the 15th. Map of 110415_rpts's severe weather reports

The storm reports for the 16th. Map of 110416_rpts's severe weather reports

Now keep in mind these are updated as of the time I am posting this. These numbers will likely go up as survey crews continues to investigate the destruction in the all of these areas. One other thing to keep in mind is the number of storm reports compared to what each storm produced. May seem like there isn't any difference, but you can have multiple reports of the same storm. To really get down to the meat of the number of tornadoes is to look at the track of each tornado. Here are the numbers so far for the number of tornadoes that either touched down or were on the ground (according to Wikipedia).
Total # of Tornadoes: 153
# of EF0: 27
# of EF1: 59
# of EF2: 21
# of EF3: 13
# of Unrated: 33

The last time that this many tornadoes were reported in a multiple day event like this was back in 1974! What caused so many tornadoes? Good question. If you remember my previous blog about this event showing different levels of the atmosphere and different things that show the environment is favorable for tornadoes to spin up then that explains why things lined up so well for this event. To recap, there was a lot of moisture coming in from The Gulf of Mexico, there was some good lifting in the mid-levels in the atmosphere where PVA was found, there was some good lifing in the upper atmosphere with divergence and diffluence, and on top of all of that there was a strong low-level jet (LLJ) and warm air advection (WAA) in the low levels of the atmosphere. You could almost say that the planets lined up perfectly to allow this event to be so dramatic. Are we likely to see another event like this in the Southeast? There is not a "yes" or "no" answer to that because there is always a chance that this could happen again. To give some reassurance, don't count on something like this happening for a while for this month. The jet stream has moved north of the southern part of the U.S. and doesn't look to be dipping back down into the Southeast like this past event anytime soon. To really give you the image and the feeling of some of the most intense tornadoes that occured here are some videos in various locations in each day of this historic event.

Tushka/Atoka, OK EF3 Tornado