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Junorch obs and discussion 2026


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IL had 20+ tornado reports yesterday, and the state is now over 190 for the year (*reports*, not actual tornadoes, there are duplicate reports in this total).
 
Attached is a map for the bigger state totals through 6/19.  The disparity is amazing.  Why IL only so much more?  It's not like when an area is soaked or buried repeatedly w/ rain/snow.  That is more on the synoptic level and areal coverage is larger.  When you get down to a local level, such as an area that is about avg size for a U.S. state, that's not the same for scale.  And to get tornadoes, it is a lot more conditional (harder) than say a lot of heavy rain or snow over an extended period (CoastalWx would disagree about the heavy snow!). :P
 
But given the vagaries of the atmosphere/patterns and given enough time, you are going to see things due to the law of large numbers and averages.  Just pointing this out b/c some try to assign a specific meaning or cause, where sometimes there is none.
 
Yes, I know of the hypothesis that tornado alley is shifting E, but we really do not have enough solid data IMHO.  Tornadoes, esp. weak and short-lived ones, were severely under-counted prior to the 1990s since storm chasing was not yet mainstream, WSR-88Ds did not exist for operational use, nor did the Internet (at least in widespread use).  ~35 years of data is not enough time to establish a trend either way.  I would argue that it wasn't until 2010 or so when we started to get close to actual number of tornadoes that occur every year in the U.S. w/ the  advent of the smartphone and dual-polarization radar.
 
 

torstate.jpg

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1 hour ago, vortex95 said:
IL had 20+ tornado reports yesterday, and the state is now over 190 for the year (*reports*, not actual tornadoes, there are duplicate reports in this total).
 
Attached is a map for the bigger state totals through 6/19.  The disparity is amazing.  Why IL only so much more?  It's not like when an area is soaked or buried repeatedly w/ rain/snow.  That is more on the synoptic level and areal coverage is larger.  When you get down to a local level, such as an area that is about avg size for a U.S. state, that's not the same for scale.  And to get tornadoes, it is a lot more conditional (harder) than say a lot of heavy rain or snow over an extended period (CoastalWx would disagree about the heavy snow!). :P
 
But given the vagaries of the atmosphere/patterns and given enough time, you are going to see things due to the law of large numbers and averages.  Just pointing this out b/c some try to assign a specific meaning or cause, where sometimes there is none.
 
Yes, I know of the hypothesis that tornado alley is shifting E, but we really do not have enough solid data IMHO.  Tornadoes, esp. weak and short-lived ones, were severely under-counted prior to the 1990s since storm chasing was not yet mainstream, WSR-88Ds did not exist for operational use, nor did the Internet (at least in widespread use).  ~35 years of data is not enough time to establish a trend either way.  I would argue that it wasn't until 2010 or so when we started to get close to actual number of tornadoes that occur every year in the U.S. w/ the  advent of the smartphone and dual-polarization radar.
 
 

torstate.jpg

That is a pretty amazing disparity. I hope an angry God isn’t the cause. Ha

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1 hour ago, vortex95 said:
IL had 20+ tornado reports yesterday, and the state is now over 190 for the year (*reports*, not actual tornadoes, there are duplicate reports in this total).
 
Attached is a map for the bigger state totals through 6/19.  The disparity is amazing.  Why IL only so much more?  It's not like when an area is soaked or buried repeatedly w/ rain/snow.  That is more on the synoptic level and areal coverage is larger.  When you get down to a local level, such as an area that is about avg size for a U.S. state, that's not the same for scale.  And to get tornadoes, it is a lot more conditional (harder) than say a lot of heavy rain or snow over an extended period (CoastalWx would disagree about the heavy snow!). :P
 
But given the vagaries of the atmosphere/patterns and given enough time, you are going to see things due to the law of large numbers and averages.  Just pointing this out b/c some try to assign a specific meaning or cause, where sometimes there is none.
 
Yes, I know of the hypothesis that tornado alley is shifting E, but we really do not have enough solid data IMHO.  Tornadoes, esp. weak and short-lived ones, were severely under-counted prior to the 1990s since storm chasing was not yet mainstream, WSR-88Ds did not exist for operational use, nor did the Internet (at least in widespread use).  ~35 years of data is not enough time to establish a trend either way.  I would argue that it wasn't until 2010 or so when we started to get close to actual number of tornadoes that occur every year in the U.S. w/ the  advent of the smartphone and dual-polarization radar.
 
 

torstate.jpg

Wouldn't they have been under counted in Oklahoma as well?

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2 minutes ago, kdxken said:

Wouldn't they have been under counted in Oklahoma as well?

Yes, all states under-counted a lot prior to the 1990s.  Once the NWS Modernization and Restructuring occurred in the 90s, detection or documentation of tornadoes improved considerably.

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