36 Tornadoes: Top tornado outbreak in Minnesota history?

Posted at 7:37 AM on June 18, 2010 by Paul Huttner (7 Comments)
Filed under: Record, Severe weather

We may have just witnessed the biggest tornado outbreak in Minnesota history.

As of late Thursday night, NOAA's Storm Prediction Center lists 36 tornado reports in the state of Minnesota Thursday. Some of these may be multiple reports of the same tornado from different observers.

Preliminary SPC severe weather reports for Thursday.

NWS offices around the region will dispatch survey teams to confirm final numbers, but it is possible that Thursday's final number of tornadoes may break or rival the record for most tornado touchdowns ever on record for a single day in Minnesota.

Red triangles indicate NWS tornado reports Thursday. Blue is hail, orange is wind damage, green is flash flood.

The standing record until Thursday was 27 tornadoes in one day on June 16th, 1992.

Here are the top 10 single day tornado outbreaks in Minnesota history. (NWS data)

1. June 16, 1992: 27 tornadoes
2. July 1, 1997: 18 tornadoes
3. June 11, 2001: 16 tornadoes
3. June 13, 2001: 16 tornadoes
5. June 28, 1979: 15 tornadoes
5. June 24, 2003: 15 tornadoes
7. July 21, 1995: 14 tornadoes
7. October 26, 1996: 14 tornadoes
7. March 29, 1998: 14 tornadoes
7. July 25, 2000: 14 tornadoes

There were 20 reports of tornadoes in North Dakota Thursday.

It appears we made (dubious?) weather history in Minnesota on Thursday.

PH

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Comments (7)

Paul, The sky over the metro was simultaneously beautiful and eerie last night, changing from yellow to green to orange. What causes that?

Posted by Sara | June 18, 2010 9:03 AM

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Dubious weather history indeed, Paul.

I would also like to know the answer to Sara's question. I noticed that sky last night in Eagan was leaning more on the yellow and orange spectrum.

Posted by Shane | June 18, 2010 9:45 AM

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Another request for the eerie sky cause! Thanks for all the posts. I was following it last night to see if the storms were headed for us.

Posted by Karen | June 18, 2010 9:55 AM

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@Karen, @Sara

I know that green/yellow skies during storms is at least partially caused by ice high in the clouds, indicating a powerful updraft.

Posted by Disco | June 18, 2010 12:15 PM

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Hi All:

Sorry for the delay on this one. It's been a crazy 24 hours.

The unusual colors last night were probably a combination of several things.

Disco is right, anytime you put large amounts of ice crystals and hail into the equation, you're going to get refraction of light and it creates some crazy colors as it breaks up the visible light spectrum. This is called the prism effect.

Also, the colors occurred close to sunset last night, which means the sun was hitting the bottom of the clouds also as it set.

Combine that with gaps in between storms, and you've got the recipe for all kinds of possibilities when it comes to colors.

Amazing stuff. Wish I could have seen more of the sky but I was literally trapped in the weather lab for about 10 hours.

PH

Posted by Paul Huttner | June 18, 2010 2:33 PM

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I noticed that the records # in a given day where all clustered in the last two decades (90's and 2000's). considereing how many years back MN weather records go - I was wondering if this could be a result of 'tornado alley' expanding north as part of the shifting climate patterns.

Going off memory, I think # of tornados might not be changing - but are we getting them in clumps with higher severity storms?

Posted by Deb | June 18, 2010 3:05 PM

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I don't know if this means anything (probably not), but the top 5 single-day outbreaks occurred within the same 3-week period from near-middle of June to beginning of July. And with the latest event's current count of 16, the top 6 outbreaks are still in that same 3-week period.

BTW, nice job on keeping the state's residents updated with severe weather. For a while, I wondered if the "M" in MPR stood for "meteorology" :-)

Posted by Chris B. Critter | June 21, 2010 11:13 AM

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