Christmas Day tornadoes rare, but not unheard of
Posted: 12/26/2012
The National Weather Service took reports of at least 34 separate tornadoes in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Dec. 25, 2012, according to the service’s Storm Prediction Center.
The Christmas holiday may conjure visions of snow and ice, but twisters like the ones reported in the south on Tuesday are not unheard of this time of year.
Ten storm systems in the last 50 years have spawned at least one Christmastime tornado with winds of 113 mph or more in the South, said Chris Vaccaro, a National Weather Service spokesman in Washington, via email.
The most lethal were the storms of Dec. 24-26, 1982, when 29 tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi killed three people and injured 32.
Prior to this year, a total of 30 tornadoes touched down on Christmas Day since 1964, according to online twister tracker TornadoHistoryProject.com .
The most recent were a series of six tornadoes in Florida in 2006, according to the Storm Prediction Center.
The Associated Press Contributed to this Report
Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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