NEW YORK STATE (WROC) — With a confirmed tornado in downtown Buffalo on Monday, 2024 now has the most tornadoes on record for a single year in New York State with 26 replacing 1992 which had 25. Notably too, it’s only August at the time of writing, and there is still room on the runway so to say to add more onto 2024’s record breaking total.

Why has 2024 seen so many confirmed tornadoes?

Broadly speaking there are really three major reasons that are driving our record breaking year:

1. An Active Weather Pattern
2. Beryl’s Remnants
3. Better Technology

Active Weather Pattern

Severe weather comes in many forms, and tornadoes require a relatively specific set of circumstances to form. The more often you see different ingredients for severe weather come together, eventually like flipping a coin, you’re going to end up with times when what you need to see an environment capable of producing one or multiple tornadoes come together.

And through July 10-16 we saw just that as Beryl’s remnants, and two squall lines, or Quasi-Linear Convective Systems, of thunderstorms passed through the state. Each event was unique in exactly why it was favorable for tornadoes to form and serves as a strong example of how severe weather can come together in a number of different ways to produce the same end result. Ultimately this 6-day period alone produced 21 of the 26 tornadoes seen across New York this year.

Beryl’s Remnants

Beryl was record breaking for a lot of reasons: becoming the earliest category 4 & 5 hurricane on record, the third earliest major hurricane to form in the Atlantic, among others. In New York, what was left of Beryl and a warm front worked in conjunction to warrant 42 tornado warnings across the state on July 10, setting a single day record for the most warnings in the state. In total only 7 tornadoes were ultimately confirmed to have touched down between Western and Central New York; which is the second highest daily total for confirmed tornadoes so far this year.

The main low pressure of Beryl’s remnants tracked just to the west of Western New York putting us squarely in what’s known as the right front quadrant of the system. Ongoing research has often pointed to this part of tropical systems having the most favorable instability, also called CAPE or colloquially “storm fuel”, and shear, and a change in wind speed or direction with height, to produce tornadoes in the outer spiral rainbands of these storms. Despite the storm no longer being considered tropical by meteorological standards, it’s not uncommon to see wind shear and instability remain elevated in this region after the system transitions from tropical to extra-tropical.

Also present across much of Western and Central New York through the afternoon was a warm front attached to Beryl’s remnants that stalled out near I-90, the New York State Thruway. Along a warm front, much like in the right front quadrant of a tropical system, you can find high levels of wind shear, specifically directional wind shear which out of the two types of wind shear is most likely to produce a tornado. The enhanced shear coupled with the already present strong instability helped to produce discrete, or individual, supercells which are seen infrequently compared to other types of storm modes in New York.

Better Technology

Across the board in Meteorology, advancements in ways to detect weather have increased the understanding of the world around us, the accuracy of forecasts, and allowed us to see more than we had ever been able to. Including before, during, and after major weather events.

Multiple tornadoes, primarily those that occured on July 16 through the Adirondacks, were confirmed by damage located and assessed via satellite passes, and even drone flights. Due to their remote locations, some not even near any marked trails, it was near impossible to be able to survey or even locate these damage tracks in person as would normally be done. 20 years ago, and maybe even earlier, it would be difficult to say whether those damage paths would have ever been found in the middle of the woods via satellite as the resolution wasn’t anywhere near what we have today.

At the end of the day, this point is arguably the main reason why we have the most tornadoes on record for a single year. Logically there have likely been many tornadoes up through the Adirondacks and other remote regions of the state that simply since the damage was never observed or surveyed the tornado never got added to the total for that year. It’s just as the old saying goes: “If a tree falls in the forest, but there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

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