The AccuWeather.com Tornado Season Forecast
For the first time, we have issued a forecast for Tornado Season 2010. This has been created this year due to a large shift in the area where the highest risk of tornadoes. I wanted to present some additional maps. First, here is the forecast... you can read more in our news story as to the detailed reasoning for this; I want to concentrate on showing you some additional maps that explain how this year's situation is different than usual. If you compare this year's risk area to Tornado Alley, it is really a marked shift:
Unfortunately for the government's storm chasing project VORTEX2 (which I wrote about last year - this is their second & last year and 2009 was not good), their coverage area is very similar to the "Tornado Alley" map shown above.
Our forecast is very similar to the normal Spring (March - May) tornado pattern, except that Tornado Alley is cut out (the map below shows 30 years of tornado tracks).
And it will be like nothing like we've seen in the last 10 years - looking at the tornado plot maps from SPC for 2001-2009, we will have that strong Midwest & Southeast component like 2006 and 2008, but none of the last ten years show weak numbers in the Plains (except for generally inactive seasons like 2009).
