IEM Daily Feature
Tuesday, 12 April 2022

April Hatched Tornado Risk

Posted: 12 Apr 2022 05:15 AM

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is most known for it's categorical outlooks of severe weather (ie slight, moderate, high risk), but they also break those outlook risks into probabilities by threat type (ie hail, wind, and tornado). The "significant" (sometimes called "hatched" since it appears as a hatching on the various SPC maps) overlay to the threat probabilities indicates an area with a threat to see very violent tornados (EF2 and stronger). Today's day 1 outlook issued early this morning has such a hatched tornado threat risk over Iowa today. The featured map presents the number of such day 1 events since 2002 during April. These events are somewhat rare for this far north during April with only a handful of events or fewer on record for the state. The threat today is conditional and is not a foregone conclusion, but the combination of needed ingredients are in place to support strong tornadoes.

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Tags:   spc