Week 10 Extreme Weather

The country I will be focusing on is the United States and the natural hazard will be thunderstorms.

A severe thunderstorm is defined as a thunderstorm that includes a tornado, and/or winds of at least 58 mph, and/or hail of at least 1 inch in diameter. All thunderstorms, whether or not they're officially defined as severe, contain lightning.

Something quite interesting that I found while doing some research was that there were severe storms and a few tornadoes forecast to take place across portions of the southern Plains and Southeast over several days. The Storm Prediction Center placed areas from Kansas to Alabama under a risk for severe storms on Friday (3/24/17) and Saturday (3/25/17). The risk of violent storms on Friday will extend all the way from central Kansas and western Missouri to northeastern Texas and western Louisiana, according to AccuWeather. On Saturday (3/25), the worst of the severe weather was in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

So far this year, severe weather has been much worse than usual in the U.S. As of Wednesday (3/22/17), there have been a total of 369 reports of tornadoes across the country, about double the average, according to the prediction center. Reports of hail and wind are also twice the average.

This picture is from The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center's twitter account: 

Sources:

https://twitter.com/NWSSPC

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/day2otlk.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/03/23/severe-storms-tornadoes-southern-us/99537944/