BTW, why can I find no Tornado Frequency/Severity data prior to 1950?
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because we didn’t start really keeping track of all them until then....
mostly using newspaper stories ..even the 1950s data is incomplete
It wasn’t until the NWS was more modern did we have to tech to get track or a reason to even care about documenting all of them
The tornado outbreak series of May 1896 killed almost 500 people, when the population was MUCH lower. One storm that hit St. Louis + East St. Louis killed 255 people on its own.
So while this is bad, the any commentary that this is “unprecedented” is “uninformed.”