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Looking back at the historic March 31, 2023 tornado outbreak

The Quad Cities National Weather Service recorded a record-breaking 29 tornadoes that day.

MOLINE, Ill. — Officially one year ago, a historic weather event took place across the nation. 147 tornadoes were surveyed across 16 states, making it the third-highest amount of tornadoes recorded in a 24-hour period in the United States. 

The National Weather Service Quad Cities surveyed a total of 29 tornadoes, including one extreme EF-4 tornado in Keota, Iowa. This was the most recorded in one day for NWS Quad Cities' forecast area, which includes a majority of our hometowns.  

Our area was issued a rare high-risk, or level 5 out of 5 threat, from the Storm Prediction Center that day. This was our first high-risk for the area in nearly a decade. Rich Kinney, who is the warning coordination meteorologist at NWS, shed some light on how rare of an event this was locally. 

“It just doesn’t happen all that frequently in this part of the country," Kinney said. "As you know, down in Oklahoma, Texas, the southeast…much more frequent. However, that was kind of a sobering reminder that we can get that environment up here on occasion."

Credit: WQAD

The local forecast area only saw 11 severe weather-related injuries and zero fatalities. 

“We did not have any fatalities in our forecast area with those 29 tornadoes," Kinney said. "Some of that obviously due to good fortune, some of that you credit the first responders pulling folks out of the rubble, but the warning process really worked."

An in-depth timeline of the storms with warning history and reports can be found here.

April 4th, 2023

In the same week, we had a second round of severe storms that caused more damage to the metro Quad Cities region. Two EF-1 tornadoes were surveyed in Rock Island and Moline. An EF-2 tornado was surveyed in Colona. 

“That was a very significant event as well. We had a total of 6 tornadoes that day, hail up to four inches in diameter in the Quad Cities, and 90-mile-an-hour straight-line winds," Kinney said. 

Kinney also recalls how busy the National Weather Service office was that week. 

“We had a tornado during the middle of the day in Colona, so we would be working severe weather, go out and do a storm survey, come back to the office and work some more severe weather...really a crazy couple of days with several rounds of really significant severe weather," Kinney said. 

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