Has this spring been more violent than usual?

This spring feels more violent than usual.

Starting in April, it seems like we had a couple of weeks in a row where storm action would begin in the west and then sweep through the Midwest, spawning devastating tornadoes: Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas.

I might be missing a couple of states, but that is enough.

From CoPilot, I got:

In April 2024, the United States experienced an active severe weather month with more than one hundred tornadoes, including one EF-4, across the Midwest and Great Plains from April 25–28. The outbreak caused significant damage and loss of life¹. As of May 8, 2024, there have been 670 preliminary tornado reports across the U.S., well above the historical average of 559. In May, there have been 129 preliminary reports following 378 twisters in April². Additionally, Ohio led the nation for tornadoes a few weeks ago, but has since dropped in rankings³. For a detailed list of tornadoes in April 2024, you can refer to the Wikipedia page⁴. Stay safe and vigilant during severe weather seasons! 🌪️

I see that Washington Post says that April 2024 was the second most active on record – the following is my screenshot of the search about 2024 tornado season in April and May:

Wikipedia actually has a page tracking the tornado activity for April 2024. The site showed 319 for April. Here’s my image of the Excel pivot table off of the Wikipedia data:

The reason why I was wondering if this spring was more violent than usual was because I wondered if because 1) I am more aware of the climate change and 2) because of the ubiquity of the weather news nowadays, the weather just feels more extreme. Before we had social media, or even the internet, we didn’t have the news blaring at us at all hours of the day.

But today, the weather news seems to be constant.

So, I was wondering if that ubiquity was the reason for feeling like this spring was especially violent. It turns out that this spring is especially violent. The only other spring worse than this year, according to CoPilot, was April 2011, with 757 tornadoes. I did confirm that figure through some googling to make sure CoPilot was not hallucinating and it wasn’t.

Then, I asked CoPilot if it could provide me a list of every April, starting from 1960, and the number of tornadoes. While CoPilot didn’t really give me what I asked for, it did give me number of tornadoes for selected years since April and more importantly, it provided me the link to the USA Today site with the data.

Here’s the chart from the data from that page. Here’s the link to the page.

You can see that 2011 was an extremely bad year – remember, April 2011 had an insane number of tornadoes at 757 tornadoes. The years 2008 and 2004 were also bad too.

I added trend lines, both straight and exponential, and you can see that the yearly number have been sort of going up.

Now, is that due to climate change? Well, when I read about climate change, the climate people talk about hurricanes or sea level rise or fires; they don’t talk about tornadoes. As a matter of fact, one of the weather scientists actually said that it is really hard to say whether climate change is impacting the prevalence of tornadoes. There are too many factors that go into the production of tornadoes.

But that chart is kind of intriguing.

Here’s a chart that shows property damages costs. Now about costs, this gets kind of squirrely because of where the tornadoes hit can make a difference in costs. If the tornadoes hit mostly rural areas, then logically, one would expect costs to be lower. Also, population has been increasing so one would expect greater housing costs. And then there is inflation. This chart would be difficult to use as a trending method.

But I’ll say, 2011 really jumps out at you.

By the way, for Wikipedia and USA Today, I used power query to pull in the data from the site – no manual keying in the numbers!

So, yes, this spring is more violent than usual, and we are only at the beginning of the spring season. Apparently, the tornado season runs from April to June (CoPilot tells me March to June and that’s probably right – it is just April starts to get very active). We still have May and June to go through and then after that, it is watching for hurricanes! I’m NOT looking forward to that.

Oh, on top of the tornadoes, there has been a lot of flooding, especially in Texas. Southeast Texas keeps getting rained on, week after week, so the same areas are flooding.

Around the world, I have read that Brazil and Afghanistan have suffered from severe flooding too.