The word “outbreak” is actually only applied to diseases in English. A common mistake made by native German speakers when talking about volcanic eruptions is to speak of an “outbreak” here as well. Eruption and the verb “to erupt” would be correct. Not even when inmates are breaking out of prison should the term be used, but rather say “prison break.”
Under the clouds
However, there is a prominent exception to the medical outbreak rule, although nobody would speak of “storm outbreaks” in German: There has just been another “tornado outbreak” in North America, with more than 70 such from the surface of the earth to the tones reaching the base of a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud within 24 hours.
However, this “outbreak” did not set a record. For many years it belonged to the “super outbreak” of April 4, 1974: 49 years ago today, more than 100 tornadoes were registered for the first time in 24 hours. There were 148, to be precise, spread across 13 US states and the Canadian province of Ontario.
There were 319 direct fatalities. The material damage amounted to more than 800 million dollars. Today’s value would be almost five billion.
cooling and conservation of energy
Only tornadoes that occur close together in time within the same weather system, typically a low-pressure area, belong to one and the same outbreak. All of these storms, as far as has been researched so far, derive their energy primarily from heat stored in water vapour.
This is converted into kinetic energy as air rises under a cloud in the same way that allows gliders and birds to gain height. It is released simply by cooling and, above all, by condensing the previously gaseous water.
Only the “super outbreak of April 2011 surpassed the event of 1974 with 216 tornadoes on April 27 and 360 over four days. This also applies to the number of people who died directly from the storm (324) and the financial damage ( approximately $12 billion at current valuation).
Whether climate change will also make tornadoes more dangerous has not yet been clarified with certainty.
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