Fall severe weather hits with a vengeance

Since June, 2016 has been a record-low year for tornadoes, up until this week, but the autumn (or "second") severe weather season always hits, and the last two days have featured over 50 tornado reports. Here's what the yearly graph looked like before the outbreak -- 2016 was below the lowest year since statistics began in 1950.

Just today, we've had two waterspouts make landfall as tornadoes in the Florida Panhandle, and a likely tornado touch down in Atlanta.

Yesterday tornadoes struck from Louisiana to Tennessee, killing five.

The Atlanta tornado was kind of interesting. A debris ball appeared on radar, but it may have been caused by fall leaves being stirred up -- something not yet tested (to my knowledge) since we developed new radar capabilities (like correlation coefficient) a few years ago. This could be good (advance notice of rotation near the ground) or bad (it may have caused people to overestimate the strength or size of the twister). AccuWeather's Mike Smith has some additional thoughts on his blog.