April severe weather outbreak keeps tornadoes at record levels
The April 2-6, 2017 severe weather outbreak included 999 warnings issued by the National Weather Service and led to 1,438 storm reports submitted to the Storm Prediction Center. This has kept our yearly (to this date) tornado total at record levels, often above the most prolific tornado year since 1950 (that year is not indicated on the graph but is the red line).
On Wednesday, April 5, there were at least two long-track supercell thunderstorms that spawned tornadoes in Georgia and South Carolina. Reed Timmer filmed a possible funnel cloud from the southern storm live on Facebook, and recorded an amazing 360 / Virtual Reality show that makes you feel like you're right there in the storm.
Although the number of reports was down on Thursday, April 6, a tornado and waterspout actually hit Washington, D.C. and the twister was filmed in front of the Washington Monument. It damaged some of the famous cherry trees in the area. Details can be found in the NWS Baltimore's statement. Here's the crazy video:
A ranger at the Jefferson Memorial caught this afternoon storm close to the Washington Monument at the U.S capital on April 6. The storm would uproot several trees along the Tidal Basin.
April 3 and April 5 had the most reports, though April 2 had the most tornadoes.
Here's what the reports look like plotted out on a map (this is actually all of the month of April through yesterday):
Peachtree City, Georgia wins the title for "most warnings" with 99 -- one-tenth of the total of 999 warnings issued by 43 offices during the severe weather outbreak.
As is typical, most of the warnings were Severe Thunderstorm, but there were 162 tornado warnings.
As shown above with the storm reports, the geographic area stretched from Texas to the mid-Atlantic.
