Tennessee is reeling from deadly tornadoes that raced across the state in the early morning hours of March 3rd, and the cleanup and recovery, the physical and the emotional will take months perhaps even years. But what about the timing of these destructive storms? Tornadoes in the dark. Hello, I'm Charles Denny.
This is AdCast, brought to you by the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. I'm joined today by climatologist Joanne Logan with UTIA Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science. Joanne, thanks so much for being here. Tell us a little bit first of all about what you do in your job, how you teach, you do research, you do many things.
Talk about what you do in your job. Yeah, sure. Probably the biggest part of my job right now is I teach a lot. So I do teach a class in climate change, but it does relate a little bit more to agriculture and forestry and environmental science than just, you know, human impacts on humans and things like that.
Obviously, I'm interested in those topics. That's not what I study. I'm looking more when I teach and when I research into impacts on agriculture. Right, and you want to emphasize you're not a tornado expert, but obviously you know a lot more about the weather than most of us.
So, Joanne just about, but you have studied some about tornadoes and Tennessee is not really a tornado alley like we see Oklahoma and Kansas, but we do seem to at least see some here. Talk about that and we see them at night. We have a high percentage, we have the highest percentage of our tornadoes occurring at night. Do we know why that happens in Tennessee?
Well, it takes some really unique characteristics of the atmosphere. First of all, you have to have a big thunderstorm system coming to mesocyclones and things and you have to have what they call a supercell coming through. So there's certain, it's not every thunderstorm can burn tornadoes. So we have that.
There's not many places in the world that have strong tornadoes. It's with fact we're like, like, Kingdom of all of that. You know, in this part, just the US anywhere from, you know, tornado alley to what they're now calling the Dixie alley, which would be more of the Missouri, Mississippi Tennessee. It was a lot of the world gets tornadoes, but they're the much, you know, they're not the mesocyclonic ones.
They're not the big, huge ones. They're just EF 0s, EF 1s, just by comparison, the one that national, I think they just classified as an EF 4, which is that's considered as a being. It would look like we get more tornadoes than we used to, but the reporting's better. The big tornadoes, they've probably been reported since, you know, the whole 100 years.
I mean, people don't miss them. So we've known kind of, and those have not increased actually, even in the tornado alley, the number of those really big large tornadoes. What we're seeing is what seems like an increase of the smaller tornadoes, the F 0s, EF 1s, EF 2s, which cause mostly minor damage, but it's probably reporting just more storm spotters out there. In fact, it was a storm spotter who first picked up the storm coming through, getting to Nashville.
So they're the ones that first noticed it before midnight before it got there. And you told me that about 46% of our tornadoes occur at night. Yes it is, which is that was a study by a colleague over in geography done several years ago, 2016. I think she based it on the 1950 to the 2013 record, and was kind of surprised because we didn't quite, you know, realize that because you still always think of thunderstorms and tornadoes being in the late afternoon.
But it does take a special situation of dry air loft. So it's usually coming in from the West, Southwest along coupled with the warm moisture coming in from the Gulf. And we've been seeing at night where we still have that warm air pushing up from the Gulf. So it just seems that could be why we seem to be seeing more tornadoes in Dixie Alley.
Plus you have to have things like wind shear, you've got to have rotation and lots of other factors too. So for some reason, you know, I've looked, I've checked it's like we're still not really sure. Somehow we tend in Tennessee to have that combination of factors more common at night than a lot of other places do. Most other places, everything settles down at night.
You might have a thunderstorm come through, but you don't have that really unstable air and that rotation that we for some reason seem to be seeing at night. So there's a kind of unclear, we only get 20 to 30 tornadoes a year. We've had some worse years 2011. We had 45 tornadoes.
The U.S. as a whole gets 1215, 100 tornadoes a year, but only a handful of the big ones like the one we saw hit Nashville. Yeah, you know, I saw on the Tennessee and Knox when you sent a newspaper to they did a timeline of where it hit and at what time. It was Benton County about 11 PM Central Time.
Yeah, that's when the storm stopped. Right. It was about a little after midnight, Nashville, and about 2 AM cookable. So unfortunately, that is a time when most of us are asleep.
We may not hear. I mean, my kids who live in Nashville, one heard a thing on her phone. The young my son didn't hear it. So that makes these nighttime tornadoes kind of dangerous.
They are very dangerous. In fact, at Dixielle, not just Tennessee, but Mississippi and Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, they are all seeing this increase in fatalities, especially, especially high at night. Just that residential homes in general are just as secure as being in an office building or being in a Walmart or being in a church. So those structures that you might be in during the day are usually more sturdy a school, a university, than you would be in just a one or two story home.
I was going to ask you what kind of advice would you give people to, you know, regarding this? It helps to have warnings on your mobile device. Yeah, definitely. Warnings on your mobile device and set to, you know, actually go off.
So you hear it and I would be super important. A lot of places still have sirens. My daughter, she was an old hickory and they actually had sirens going off. Yeah.
So that definitely would be it. And I guess if you get the warning, take it seriously. I know folks can get pretty lack of days ago. You know, they, oh, they give us warnings all the time, but you know, we didn't have one.
All they can do is tell you that the signature is there and that is likely, but you know, they can't always predict exactly where it's going to hit. So yeah, so probably take it seriously, just like flooding and everything else and get to an interior room. A lot of houses these days are built on slabs, so they don't have basements, which would be the safer place to go. So just an interior room, preferably away from windows.
But you know, you did mention the length of it and that seems to be a little more common at night that they tend to stay on the ground a little bit longer. And I think they're still on the fence about whether it was one tornado or two tornadoes. It's hard to tell. You know, just want to just jump back up again into the storm and then come down again.
Or does it just go up and end and then a new one forms? So I still think it's, they're kind of having quite decided, you know, they did jump up the number for sure because when they first were reporting, they were saying it was probably an EF-2. And then they said, oh, no, it's probably open at the damage that was an EF-3. But the latest I've heard it was rated as an EF-4.
And it's not the highest as EF-5, so EF-4 is pretty, pretty severe. Maybe, you know, it used to be a tornado season was, you know, April to September, that was it. And you know, we've gotten some pretty bad ones in February, January. So there is some concern that the season might get a little longer, especially in the spring.
It might start to shift more towards February or March and not be this big peak that we get in April. It may still be there, but we may start to see a few more early in the year. Joanne, thanks so very much for your time. Oh, you're welcome and be safe out there.
Good advice. And thank you for listening. I'm Charles Denny. For more real life solutions provided by the UT Institute of Agriculture, go to our website at ag.tenacy.edu.