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FARGO — An outbreak of more than 30 tornadoes caused damage, death and disruption across the Deep South this past week, mostly on Tuesday night. Severe weather outbreaks like this are always unusual in the sense that it is relatively rare in the course of a human lifetime for any location on Earth to be hit by a tornado. However, severe storms and tornadoes are a regular part of the climatology of the southeastern part of the United States in winter.
Actually, the peak season down there is from February through April, but there is a secondary maximum for severe storms in November and December. Although it sounds strange to us northerners, severe storms and tornadoes are rare in the Deep South during summer. Although summer thunderstorms are frequent in Dixie, those storms rarely deliver anything worse than rain and lightning. During late fall and early winter, and again from late winter through the spring, severe weather peaks across the South.
