Thursday, March 29, 2012

Tornado Alley: Chesapeake?

The Washington Post reports a "shocking" statistic, namely that Maryland has had the 3rd highest density of tornadoes over the past two decades, beaten out only by Kansas and Florida. How is it we have more than the other Great Plains states?

Key word: density. That is, the statistic is the number of tornadoes per 10,000 square miles. That's a bit misleading. In raw numbers, Texas has the highest number (155), followed by Kansas (96), and Florida (66). As you'd expect, the other large numbers are in the central U.S. -- the so-called "Tornado Alley" -- and the deep South (sometimes called "Dixie Alley").