Does Mississippi get a lot of tornadoes? Theyre common but not as deadly.
Tornadoes are one of the greatest weather risks facing Mississippi, according to the state’s emergency management agency.
Friday’s tornado caused at least 24 deaths in Mississippi, according to state officials. It touched down near the town of Rolling Fork and continued to Silver City, staying on the ground for more than an hour.
The Southern state is hit by an average of 33 tornadoes per year, resulting in an average of eight deaths, according to the National Weather Service. Some recent studies suggest the frequency of tornadoes is increasing in the Midwest and Southeast.
Friday’s tornado was exceptionally deadly because of its preliminary rating of 4 out of 5 on the Weather Service’s Enhanced Fujita scale, the large number of vulnerable mobile homes in the region, and because it arrived at night when visibility was low, The Washington Post reported.
Mississippi was hit by 2,339 tornadoes between 1950 and 2020. Of those, only 13 tornadoes had an EF-4 rating and three had a rating of EF-5.
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Last year, Mississippi was hit by 118 tornadoes, but not a single storm had an EF-4 rating, though two storms had an EF-3 rating. Tornado season for Mississippi is between March and May, but the state also has a peak around November, according to the Weather Service.
The state’s record for most tornadoes in one year was in 2019, with 115 tornadoes, beating the previous record of 109 in 2008. The deadliest year for tornadoes in Mississippi was in 1971, when 41 tornadoes left at least 128 people dead and 1,494 injured.
The team launched to investigate the Mississippi Delta tornadoes of 1971 found that there were four major tornadoes. It also determined that the warning systems didn’t work well because fire sirens weren’t used at all locations, many people weren’t able to recognize that the sirens were meant to warn them about tornadoes, there was a lack of community shelters and many homes and buildings were inadequately constructed, according to the Weather Service.
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In the past four decades, the frequency of tornadoes in large parts of the Midwest and Southeast, including Mississippi, has increased, according to a 2018 study by Vittorio A. Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University, and Harold E. Brooks, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory.
The study identified increasing trends of tornadoes and tornado environments in Dixie Alley, which includes much of the lower Mississippi Valley region, as well as parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Mississippi does not fall in the famed “tornado alley” — a stretch of land from Texas and Oklahoma through Kansas and Nebraska that conjures images of storm chasers pursuing violent twisters.
As The Post previously reported, your greatest risk of being hit by a tornado is not actually in tornado alley, it is in the Deep South — particularly Mississippi and Alabama.
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