This is phenomenal and it is something that might move tornado science forward. The entire path of the EF-4 tornado a year ago Saturday. Not only do you see the damage path, the corresponding radar information is presented at lower right.  The map of the tornado is below. Tragically, it killed 57 people. 

Because the media and various political officials are making comparisons pertaining to Friday night's tornadoes (see posting immediately below), I thought the map below would be helpful. The green line from Missouri to Indiana is the path of the Great Tri-State Tornado, the longest tornado track in history. It was also an F-5 storm that killed 689 people. The radar echoes and the accompanying red polygons (tornado warnings issued Friday evening) represents the life of the supercell thunderstorm that spawned the worst of the tornadoes. What we don't know as yet is the length of the one or more tornadoes that this supercell produced. Is it possible that the Tri-State record has been broken? Yes. We just do not know, yet.

The headline, below, is not even close. Friday's outbreak is being hyped for political reasons.  It is a thorn in the side of those who hype global warming that tornadoes have not increased as they predicted.  Let's look at the facts. The red dots, below, are locations of tornadoes from Friday night's storms. It is an impressive outbreak. These tornadoes were especially deadly because most all of them occurred in darkness. However, we only have to go back a decade to April 27, 2011, to find a much larger outbreak. Sadly, more than 300 were killed.  On April 3, 1974, there was another outbreak larger than Friday's. None of this is to minimize the horrible destruction Friday's tornadoes brought. But, the fact is that tornadoes have not  increased due to global warming.  The above is a graph, which is a plot of the official NOAA figures, which shows violent tornadoes have significantly deceased over the last 50 years. 

This was the monster tornado near Hayti, Missouri (Bootheel) along the 200+ mile long rotation track (we don't know yet whether it was one, or multiple, tornadoes) from Arkansas to central Kentucky. If the Governor of Kentucky and others are correct, it caused at least 75 fatalities. Below is a map of the approximate track; it is the more northern of the two parallel rotation tracks.  The video was taken around 9pm -- about four hours after sunset and after some had retired for the night. Nighttime tornadoes, depending on the research results, are twice to three times as deadly as tornadoes during the day. I knew this one would be especially bad because no one is thinking of tornadoes two weeks before Christmas. So, I wonder how many people received and acted upon the excellent forecasts. I am also having a difficult time recalling a tornado outbreak when so many violent tornadoes occurred at night. While there have been individual F-5 tornadoes (Udall, Greensburg, etc.) that have ...