Tornado Tracks

When I was growing up in Cullman County, people always said tornadoes followed a path from Smith Lake up Alabama 69 toward Baileyton and Arab. Even today, people ask me all the time if there’s not something about the lay of the land that is attractive to big tornadoes. My answer is that I really don’t know, but there sure is a lot of visual evidence to support the idea!

Look at these two maps. The top map is from SPC, and it’s the last tornado event in Alabama with two EF-4 tornadoes. The bottom is a map that Dr. Fujita made of April 3-4, 1974 “Super Outbreak” tornadoes.

When you look at these maps, there are some path similarities for sure with those deadly storms that hit Lawrence and Jackson Counties this week and the F-5 at Guin and the F-4 at Jasper in 1974.

Maybe someday we will know more about the interaction between supercell thunderstorms and geographical features, but at this point, how they really work together is a still somewhat of a mystery. When I was at Mississippi State, I sat in on a thesis defense that dealt with tornadoes and topography. That showed the relationship was there, but it stopped a little short of being able to define it for use in an operational kind of setting.

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