US Tornado Review 2023 – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

It’s time to unpack the annual tornado fraud from NOAA:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/tornadoes/202313

According to NOAA’s latest annual report,  the frequency of US tornadoes has been steadily rising since the 1950s. To the average reader, this is obviously down to global warming, which we all know makes weather more extreme!

Nowhere does their report mention that we are observing more tornadoes nowadays because of better technology and reporting procedures, not because more are actually occurring. Here is the guidance that NOAA published a few years ago, something that has mysteriously disappeared from their website now. Thanks to Wayback, we can still view it.

One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.

Much early work on tornado climatology in the United States was done by John Park Finley in his book Tornadoes, published in 1887. While some of Finley’s safety guidelines have since been refuted as dangerous practices, the book remains a seminal work in tornado research. The University of Oklahoma created a PDF copy of the book and made it accessible at John Finley’s Tornadoes.

Today, nearly all of the United States is reasonably well populated, or at least covered by NOAA’s Doppler weather radars. Even if a tornado is not actually observed, modern damage assessments by National Weather Service personnel can discern if a tornado caused the damage, and if so, how strong the tornado may have been. This disparity between tornado records of the past and current records contributes a great deal of uncertainty regarding questions about the long-term behavior or patterns of tornado occurrence. Improved tornado observation practices have led to an increase in the number of reported weaker tornadoes, and in recent years EF-0 tornadoes have become more prevelant in the total number of reported tornadoes. In addition, even today many smaller tornadoes still may go undocumented in places with low populations or inconsistent communication facilities.

With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.

http://web.archive.org/web/20200410134618/https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends

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In fact, there was a definite decline in the number of strong tornadoes up to 2014, rather than the “little trend” noted by NOAA.

We now have full data for 2023, so I can extend the above two graphs:

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

The picture has changed little since 2014. There is still little long term trend in EF-1s and over, but the number of EF-3s has remained at a much lower level than pre-2000. The latest data confirms NOAA’s conclusions from 2015.

There was no EF-5 last year, nor any so far this year. The last was the Moore tornado in 2013. On average there are two EF-5s every year three years. The longest previous absence of EF-5s was between 1999 and 2007.

Moreover with only two EF-4s last year. only 2005 and 2018 had fewer.

The evidence clearly shows that tornadoes have become less intense since reliable records began in 1970, but NOAA would like you to believe otherwise.

It is hard to describe NOAA’s reporting of tornadoes as anything other than fraudulent.