AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish explains what goes into the process of officially counting tornadoes, including all the ones in the central U.S. this past weekend.
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00:00 Parts of the Plains and the Heartland
00:02 are in the very early stages of
00:04 tornado recovery after last weekend's
00:06 outbreak and meteorologist Jeff Cornish
00:08 takes a look at the tornado count
00:11 as storm surveys continue.
00:14 Over the first time since the month of
00:19 January we have stepped back up and now
00:22 we have a near normal and actually
00:24 slightly above average tornado
00:25 count for the year.
00:27 Unfortunately,
00:27 the weekend outbreak took us all
00:29 the way back up above average after
00:31 being below average and we've had
00:33 484 tornado reports this year.
00:35 On average, we'd be around 480
00:37 by this point on the calendar.
00:39 Now you can see that there have
00:41 been over 100 confirmed tornadoes,
00:43 and this number is going to continue
00:45 to rise in a significant way.
00:47 We've had our first EF4 tornado in
00:49 over a year that was in Oklahoma,
00:51 and the trend will be that we likely
00:53 see the relatively weaker tornadoes
00:55 that are still very dangerous in
00:57 the first place. The tally there of
00:59 the zeros and the F1's will likely
01:01 increase most as we move forward.
01:03 As more storm surveys are completed,
01:05 they tend to prioritize the higher
01:07 end tornadoes, which is not surprising.
01:09 And again, we've had an EF4 for the
01:11 first time in over a year.
01:13 Taking a look specifically at the EF4
01:15 tornado that was confirmed and surveyed.
01:17 This traveled 27 miles from around
01:19 Marietta, OK to Dixon, OK,
01:21 and it's been a very active storm
01:23 survey. We've had a lot of
01:25 surveys around Marietta, OK to Dixon, OK.
01:27 This was responsible for one of the
01:29 fatalities over the weekend, sadly.
01:31 It was on the ground for about
01:33 24 minutes, and it had
01:35 a 900-yard-wide
01:37 path, so it was as wide as
01:39 nine football fields, and it
01:41 traveled 27 miles forward.
01:43 So some may wonder, why does it
01:45 take so long to actually do these surveys?
01:47 Well, the National Weather Service
01:49 has to travel, in some cases, a couple
01:51 of hours from their home
01:53 bases to get to some of
01:55 these locations, if it's near the fringe of their coverage
01:57 area, and they are very, very,
01:59 very detailed. I've been on several
02:01 surveys as somebody working
02:03 in local TV with National
02:05 Weather Service officials, and they are
02:07 extraordinarily detailed in how
02:09 they rate the damage and look at types of building
02:11 construction, types of wood and trees
02:13 and hardwood versus softwood, and then
02:15 they plot all the data and do the analysis.
02:17 Thanks.