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Discussion of April 27, 2011 Outbreak



Pretty rare media of the Tuscaloosa - Birmingham EF4. Experimenting a bit with "April's fury". Seems to have been a common name to describe the 4/27 outbreak and there is likely some rare footage out there with this little phrase tagged onto it. You can rally get A grasp of how big this thing was in Birmingham. It's one of the better views too. You can definitely see the edge of it. This phrase revealed some very rare footage of the Tuscaloosa tornado near Pleasant Grove actually a while back, before it went heavily wrapped in rain.

I plan to attempt uncover further rare media whilst scouting multiple platforms about this day and see what I can find and my finds will probably go in this thread.
 
Can't believe it's about to be the 15th anniversary of 4/27 (and the insane April of 2011 as a whole, which even prior to the 27th had already established itself as one of the legendary single months for unrelenting tornado activity, up there with May of 2004 and 2008).
 
WeathermanLeprechaun said:
This is gonna be a slightly interesting take, but i really do think TOREs are overused now and that they simply don't feel as urgent as they mightve 10 years ago. My true definition of a TORE is a very high end tornado heading toward a town/city and is likely to go on course for a direct hit.
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I actually feel like tornado emergencies are getting more accurate at least for EF3+ tornadoes than 10 years ago. Just for comparison: 2016 had 8 TOREs issued (3 EF3+, 4 EF0-EF2, one for no tornado at all apparently) and 2025 had 9 (7 EF3+, 2 EF0-EF2).

Personally I would say that if a tornado looks violent on radar, it's better to issue a tornado emergency and have the damage not be as bad as the radar presentation suggests than it is to not upgrade the warning and possibly end up with preventable deaths/injuries.
 
CheeselandSkies said:
Can't believe it's about to be the 15th anniversary of 4/27 (and the insane April of 2011 as a whole, which even prior to the 27th had already established itself as one of the legendary single months for unrelenting tornado activity, up there with May of 2004 and 2008).
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I've always said that April 14-16 would have been remembered as a legendary outbreak if it had happened in any other year, probably at least as well known as Super Tuesday 2008. And as bad as it was, one thing that I think about a fair bit is how much worse 4/15 could have been, with it really being only the messiness of the morning round of storms that put a damper on the setup.

Just imagine having two super outbreaks in the space of 12 days.
 
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VultureDirge89 said:
I actually feel like tornado emergencies are getting more accurate at least for EF3+ tornadoes than 10 years ago. Just for comparison: 2016 had 8 TOREs issued (3 EF3+, 4 EF0-EF2, one for no tornado at all apparently) and 2025 had 9 (7 EF3+, 2 EF0-EF2).

Personally I would say that if a tornado looks violent on radar, it's better to issue a tornado emergency and have the damage not be as bad as the radar presentation suggests than it is to not upgrade the warning and possibly end up with preventable deaths/injuries.
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I think something people don’t realize in relation to tornado emergencies is that the entire point wasn’t just to be confined to violent tornadoes - even in high-end EF2s mobile homes can be obliterated. It was to warn the public in case of a dangerous tornado (again, that can be EF2-EF5) that is heading into a heavily-populated areas. I don’t know why population isn’t officially factored in, though.

4/27 was arguably overkill though; I can’t even count how many there were, including a few for storms which I don’t even think were above EF1 intensity. Might be wrong though.
 
KakashiHatake2000 said:
Weatherman leprechaun to this day people are uncovering lost photos or video from April 27th 2011 tornado outbreak Apparently
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IIRC there have been occasional instances of people uploading videos of even older weather events (e.g. the 04/26/1991 outbreak) online even to this day. I can't help but wonder how many images/videos of various events (not just weather events, either) are currently gathering dust in various storage spaces that could use some uploading to the Internet instead...
 
Central Ohio Wx said:
I think something people don’t realize in relation to tornado emergencies is that the entire point wasn’t just to be confined to violent tornadoes - even in high-end EF2s mobile homes can be obliterated. It was to warn the public in case of a dangerous tornado (again, that can be EF2-EF5) that is heading into a heavily-populated areas. I don’t know why population isn’t officially factored in, though.

4/27 was arguably overkill though; I can’t even count how many there were, including a few for storms which I don’t even think were above EF1 intensity. Might be wrong though.
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16 TOR Emergencies to be exact
 
JPWX said:
16 TOR Emergencies to be exact
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1771942279774.png
It's crazy that you can directly make out the path of the Cullman, Yantley, Tuscaloosa, Cordova, Higdon and Lake Martin EF4s, as well as the Eoline and Huntland EF3s based solely on the TOREs issued. Wild day.
 
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Also, if anyone is interested in the meteorological aspect of 4/27 I would highly suggest reading this study; it's very informative. In it is this photo of the infamous collapsed Cullman transmission tower, which was visible being obliterated on ABC3340's skycam.
1771963612655.png
Don't think I've seen this one shared often, or at least the aftermath of it.
 
CheeselandSkies said:
Just from skimming the Wikipedia lists I count a whopping twenty-two EF3+ tornadoes (almost averaging one per day) from April 1-26, 2011.
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Well, you had the Moundland EF3 on April 15 (?), the Raleigh EF3 on April 16, and I’m pretty sure the Tushka, OK EF3 was sometime in April 2011. It really was back-to-back outbreaks.
 
Central Ohio Wx said:
Well, you had the Moundland EF3 on April 15 (?), the Raleigh EF3 on April 16, and I’m pretty sure the Tushka, OK EF3 was sometime in April 2011. It really was back-to-back outbreaks.
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Yeah, that one was on the 14th.

One thing of note, despite the extreme levels of activity it wasn't considered a great month for Plains/Midwest chasers. Tushka was in the southeastern part of Oklahoma where there is quite thick tree coverage. The 9th-10th Iowa/Wisconsin outbreak was mostly after dark/up north in the trees. As for the 15th-16th and 25th-27th, at the time only the most hardcore folks (Timmer and the like) were willing to chase "Dixie Alley," especially given the screaming storm motions of the 27th. IMO that day is what really kind of broke the dam on popularizing the "Chase anything, anywhere" mentality, especially given the advent of more reliable/higher-quality livestream technology over the ensuing few years.

*I didn't even realize it until now when looking on the map, but my wife and I passed through Tushka on US 69/75 on our way back home from visiting her aunt in San Antonio in May of 2024. We'd had dinner in McKinney, TX and stopped for the night in McAlester, OK (I'd been hoping to make Muskogee but it was getting quite late and I was very tired).
 
Central Ohio Wx said:
Lake Martin EF4s
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You rang?

In addition there were tornado emergencies issued for no tornado at all on more than one occasion, but no tornado emergency for the strongest tornado of the event (Smithville) or the marathon of Georgia siggies (including what was almost certainly an EF5) that occurred in the evening/overnight hours.
 
Lake Martin EF4 said:
In addition there were tornado emergencies issued for no tornado at all on more than one occasion, but no tornado emergency for the strongest tornado of the event (Smithville) or the marathon of Georgia siggies (including what was almost certainly an EF5) that occurred in the evening/overnight hours.
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Highly unpopular take (I'm full of those) but I can actually understand the fundamentals of why a tornado emergency wasn't issued for Smithville. It's very similar to Joplin in that the structure highly intensified over a very few number of scans, and they were already dealing with so many warnings that they might not have had time to discuss TOR-Eing that one. Pretty sure it was caught in the Hamilton-area TORE once it crossed into AL, though. I mean, it went from this:
1771971927591.png
To this:
1771971944616.png
In one singular scan. Notice how it had hit Smithville between scans; by the time it was TOR-E'd it would've likely already been out of town.

On the flipside you could argue that they should've TOR-E'd the parent storm as far back as the Houston area, when the Okolona EF3 was on the ground:
1771971706702.png
I could see that being the case if MEG didn't play conservative on 4/27.

As for Georgia, of all the ones I think should've been TOR-E'd it has to be Barnesville:
1771971516332.png1771971522643.png
The radar presentation on the Ringgold storm was horrible, so I get why that one didn't get the emergency tag:
1771971457166.png1771971480501.png
 
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Central Ohio Wx said:
View attachment 50791
It's crazy that you can directly make out the path of the Cullman, Yantley, Tuscaloosa, Cordova, Higdon and Lake Martin EF4s, as well as the Eoline and Huntland EF3s based solely on the TOREs issued. Wild day.
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What site is this? I'm presuming it's IEM, but I didn't know you could filter certain warning types.
 
VultureDirge89 said:
I actually feel like tornado emergencies are getting more accurate at least for EF3+ tornadoes than 10 years ago. Just for comparison: 2016 had 8 TOREs issued (3 EF3+, 4 EF0-EF2, one for no tornado at all apparently) and 2025 had 9 (7 EF3+, 2 EF0-EF2).

Personally I would say that if a tornado looks violent on radar, it's better to issue a tornado emergency and have the damage not be as bad as the radar presentation suggests than it is to not upgrade the warning and possibly end up with preventable deaths/injuries.
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It also depends on radar beam. That is a decent point that 2025 did verify quite well with the majority of TOREs issued. I just think the criteria has changed massively over the past few years. I don't disagree with the Plevna event,.that looked like a truly high end event very worthy of a TORE. Marion, yes. Offices did well last year
 
Central Ohio Wx said:
On the flipside you could argue that they should've TOR-E'd the parent storm as far back as the Houston area, when the Okolona EF3 was on the ground:
View attachment 50798
I could see that being the case if MEG didn't play conservative on 4/27.
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Agree on this. That’s essentially been my opinion. That was one mean radar presentation and the environment was extremely supportive of long lived tornados. They should have put the Tor E for communities upstream similar to what they did after the Mayfield tornado left Mayfield.
 
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