65 Tornadoes, Comparing to March 1

A total of 65 tornado reports were filed with the NWS yesterday during the massive severe weather outbreak, and one storm proved deadly near Elmwood, Oklahoma according to CNN. Some raw radar animations from RadarPlus are now available and more will be added later. If you didn't see last night's live v-blog demo of RadarPlus during the heart of the storms, check it out.

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How does this outbreak compare to the Southeast Outbreak from almost exactly one month ago? In numbers of tornado reports, and overall severe weather reports, the outbreaks were very similar. Here are the numbers:

One interesting thing is that the number of wind and hail reports are reversed, even though the tornado and total numbers are similar. I would attribute this to these storms being better hail generators -- it's hard to generate large or widespread hail outside of Tornado Alley. The smaller number of wind reports, I would estimate, would probably be due to sparse population, and sparse vegetation in some areas.

I would also expect that we'll see more large tornadoes being surveyed with this outbreak, again because of the dynamics of Tornado Alley in general, and the severe index numbers that we saw yesterday, which were much higher than in the Southeast outbreak.

And finally, I would assume the difference in the number of Tornado Warnings is again due to the sparse population, and larger counties, in the Plains.

*Lightning data provided by USPLN through exclusive agreement with AccuWeather.com LightningPlus.