JULY 2011 SILVA DIAS 209

An Increase in the Number of Tornado Reports in Brazil

MARIA A. F. SILVA DIAS

Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

(Manuscript received 1 September 2010, in final form 8 August 2011)

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the development of tornado reports in Brazil since the middle of the twentieth century,
both for the country as a whole and for the five regions of Brazil: the south, southeast, central-west, northeast,
and north. No official tornado registry exists in Brazil so the reports come from various sources. Most of the
tornadoes reported are from the south and southeast regions. The low number of reports for the central-west
regions suggests, in view of the literature on intense storms and mesoscale convective complexes, that most
tornadoes cases go unreported. The increase in tornado reports is compared to the evolution of population
density and communications, with the latter represented by the evolution of local television stations and the
popularization of the Internet. One particular event is a new Web site for volunteer tornado reports, which has
completely changed the trends of tornado reports. Another possible cause for an increase in the number of
tornado reports in the south and southern regions could be a shift in climate variability in this region in the
1970s, which has been reported by several authors. However, the increase in rainfall and extreme events
reported by these studies point to an increase of as much as 40%, which is not compatible with the observed
tenfold increase in tornado reports.

1. Introduction Tornadoes are the most violent feature associated with

One of the main threats of global warming as summa-
rized by Solomon et al. (2007) is the possible increased
frequency of weather extremes. This is a statement that
has been frequently broadcast by the media and is un-
derstood by the general public, at least in Brazil, where
every single occurrence of strong winds, hail, or floods
immediately poses the question to climate scientists and
to meteorologists: Is this phenomenon due to global
warming? Balling and Ceverny (2003) commented that
in the United States there appears to be a substantial
mismatch between public perception and actual trends
in severe storm activity. A recent opinion survey pub-
lished by one of the leading newspapers in Brazil, O
Estado de São Paulo, indicates that 88% of the 1000
people interviewed (from different regions and social
backgrounds) know about global warming, and 80%
said that they have noticed a climate change in recent
years; 89% of those who think that they have perceived
the climate change, classify it as ‘‘bad’’ (O Estado de
São Paulo, 6 December 2009, p. A29).
Corresponding author address: Maria A. F. Silva Dias, Rua do
Matão 1226, Cidade Universitária, Department of Atmospheric
Sciences, University of São Paulo, 05508-090 São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
E-mail: mafdsdia@model.iag.usp.br
severe storms, though they have a short lifetime (usually
from a few minutes to 20 min), a short pathlength (usu-
ally less than 20 km), and small dimensions (a few hun-
dred meters in diameter). Though they were practically
unknown to most Brazilians just a few decades ago, tor-
nadoes have been mentioned in the news more and more
in recent years, and even more educated segments of
society seem to believe they are a new weather phe-
nomenon that Brazil had never experienced before.
Judging from the material in the international litera-
ture, tornadoes are practically absent in Brazil. Fujita
(1973) was the first to attempt to map the geographical
occurrence of tornadoes in the world. Goliger and
Milford (1998) and Brooks and Doswell (2001a) updated
Fujita’s world statistics on tornadoes, including more
cases. In both studies, tornadoes in South America were
detected only in Argentina, with very few cases in the
southern region of Brazil.
According to Doswell et al. (1999), tornado reporting
in the United States is a result of a combination of the
public forecasting services and volunteer spotter pro-
grams. They state that in March 1952, the U.S. Weather
Bureau started a Severe Local Storms Forecasting unit,
which had the direct result of an increase in tornado
reports from an average of less than 200 to 1200 yr21 by

DOI: 10.1175/2011WCAS1095.1

Ó 2011 American Meteorological Society

210 WEATHER, CLIMATE, AND SOCIETY VOLUME 3

the end of the 1990s (see also Verbout et al. 2006). Brooks
and Doswell (2001b) attribute this increase to better
observation and reporting procedures.
In Brazil, there is no official reporting system for tor-
nadoes, but spontaneous volunteers have helped raise the
awareness that tornadoes do occur and that they are a
potential threat to life and property. This article addresses
the increase in tornado reports found in the media,
newspapers, television, and Internet in Brazil. Though
this kind of reporting is irregular and unscientific, it is the
only available source for this phenomenon, other than the
very few cases that have reached the scientific literature.
The frequency of tornado reports in the various regions
of Brazil is presented, and apparent trends over a few
decades are discussed to attempt to explain the increased
frequency, mostly based on the increase in media cover-
age and the advent of the Internet. Section 2 describes the
data sources used, section 3 reports the geographical
distribution and apparent trends, section 4 discusses other
possibilities as causes for the observed trends based on
climate variability and/or climate change, and section 5
presents the conclusions. FIG. 1. South American map with the five regions in Brazil, the
south (S), southeast (SE), central-west (CW), northeast (NE), and
north (N).
2. Data
There is no official compilation of tornado episodes by
the Brazilian government weather service. The surface The reason for choosing only documented cases is to
network of meteorological stations has improved con- ensure the reliability of the tornado cases.
siderably over recent years, mostly using automated To relate tornado observations with area and pop-
weather stations that do not report severe weather– ulation of each of the five regions of Brazil (see Fig. 1),
related phenomena. The weather stations that do have the information compiled by the Brazilian Federal
visual observations are restricted to larger cities. Government (available online at http://www.ibge.gov.br)
Since the early twentieth century sporadic cases of is used. Because most of the tornado occurrences are
tornadoes have been reported, with a few appearing in documented through local television stations, a possible
the international literature (De Sampaio Ferraz 1927; indicator of media coverage is the number of affiliated
Dyer 1988, 1994; Silva Dias 1999), but most of those are local television stations of the largest network in Brazil,
in Portuguese, having been published in the proceedings TV Globo, which today reaches 99% of the country.
of local meteorological meetings or local meteorological Their Web site (http://comercial.redeglobo.com.br/
journals. Particularly relevant are the reports by Nechet atlas2004) shows the present geographical distribution of
(2002) and Marcelino (2003), which present the general affiliated local stations, and Munhoz Rosario (2008) de-
conditions of tornado occurrence and the documenta- scribes the evolution of the TV Globo network since 1965.
tion of damage associated with tornadoes.
After the popularization of the Internet, in 2005 a
3. Geographical distribution and trends of
group of meteorologists started to document tornado
tornado reports
cases and publish their associated features on a Web site
(http://www.temposeveronobrasil.com; see the acknowl- Brazil is a country with various regional climates, from
edgments section at the end of this paper). They also tried very equatorial in the north to the subtropical climate in
to compile past tornado events that were scattered over the south. The five political regions in Fig. 1 are also dis-
different publications and newspaper reports. With their tinguished by well-defined regional climates. Satyamurti
permission, the data from their site, as of early 2009, et al. (1999) describe the average climate of each region
will be used here. With the intention of confirming the and emphasize the differences in annual rainfall regimes.
occurrence of tornadoes, only cases with an associated With respect to intense storms that might generate dam-
newspaper article or television news report are used. aging winds and eventually tornadoes, the work of Zipser
JULY 2011 SILVA DIAS 211

TABLE 1. Number and percent of tornado, waterspout, and

funnel cloud classification by the various sources listed in text
(but mainly from http://www.temposeveronobrasil.com).

Tornado classification No. %

F3 6 3.8
F2 5 3.2
F1/F2 4 2.5
F1 6 3.8
F0/F1 5 3.2
F0 9 5.7
Tornado 69 43.7
Funnel cloud 24 15.2
Waterspout 30 19.0
Total 158 100.0

FIG. 2. Cumulative number of tornado and waterspout reports in

each of the five regions of Fig. 1.
to Velasco and Fritsch (1987). Durkee and Mote (2010)
have a new climatology of MCC occurrence in South
et al. (2006) indicates that the south region (see Fig. 1) is America and show that most of the south, southeast,
close to the maximum occurrence and intensity of heavy and central-west regions are affected. As seen in Figs. 2
storms in South America, which is centered in northern and 3, and the references above, it is possible that most
Argentina. According to their work, intense storms can tornadoes in the central-west region, especially in its
also be found in other regions—with lower frequency in southern half, are not reported.
the southeast, central-west, and north, and rarely in the Satyamurti et al. (1999) state that, in spite of the
northeast. Amazon basin having the largest annual rainfall in the
The list of tornadoes reported in Brazil from the country, the frequency of thunderstorms is surprisingly
various sources mentioned in the previous section, up to low. There are tornado events, however, reported close
2008, shows a total of 158 cases that can be separated to the northern coast, and along the Amazon River close
into each of the five regions of Fig. 1. Figure 2 shows the
cumulative number of tornado reports from 1960 to 2008.
Three reports from before 1960 have been left out of the
figure (1923, 1927, and 1957). Each report has an associ-
ated classification given by the source of the information.
Table 1 shows the number of times each classification
is used. The Fujita F scale (Fujita 1971) is used in some
cases; in others, the authors of the report only mention
a tornado, funnel cloud, or waterspout. It may be seen
that the highest use of the Fujita scale is F3, which is seen
in six cases. Waterspouts are tornadoes over water and
are usually classified as F0 in Brazil. In Fig. 2 all of the
cases that have been included in Table 1 are used. Figure 3
shows the geographical location and season of each re-
port, excluding funnel clouds, which are not considered
developed tornadoes.
Figures 2 and 3 show that most of the tornado reports
are in the south region, followed by the southeast, north,
northeast, and central-west, in this order. Referring
again to Zipser et al. (2006), specifically to their Fig. 4, it
can be seen that severe thunderstorms have been detected
over most of Brazil, with the clear exception of the
northeast region. The south region is in the usual track of
FIG. 3. Location and season of tornadoes and waterspouts re-
most of the mesoscale convective complexes (MCCs) of ports (funnel clouds have not been plotted). December–February
subtropical South America, which are one of the impor- (DJF) is summer, March–May (MAM) is fall, June–August (JJA)
tant sources of tornadoes in northern Argentina, according is winter, and September–November (SON) is spring.
212 WEATHER, CLIMATE, AND SOCIETY VOLUME 3

TABLE 2. Area and population of each of the five regions of Brazil: south, southeast, central-west, northeast, and north. Source: http://
www.ibge.gov.br. Location may be seen in Fig. 1.

S SE CW NE N
Area (km2) 575,316 927,286 1,604,852 1,556,001 3,851,560
Population (million)
1940 5.74 18.34 1.26 14.43 1.46
1950 7.84 22.55 1.74 17.97 1.84
1960 11.75 30.63 2.94 22.18 2.56
1970 16.49 39.85 5.07 28.12 3.60
1980 19.03 51.73 7.55 34.81 5.88
1991 22.13 62.74 9.42 42.49 10.04
2000 25.11 72.42 11.64 47.74 12.89

to the cities of Manaus (3869070S, 60819300W) and as to why the number of tornado reports has increased,
Santarem (28269350S, 548429300W). This is a region the first reply is to relate it to population density, because
where intense squall lines are seen (Cohen et al. 1995; tornado reports depend on direct observations made by
Rickenbach 2004). Interestingly, in the north region people. The areas of the five regions may be seen in Table 2,
most of the cases have been reported close to the north- where the evolving population of the five regions of Brazil
ern coast and documented by Nechet (2002), a professor from 1940 to 2000 is also included. The population density
of Meteorology at the Federal University of Pará (located in 2000 is also shown in Fig. 4.
in Belém, 18279210S, 488309160W), who has been collect- The southeast region shows the highest population
ing cases for the last 30 years. In the Amazon, basin blow density, followed by the south, northeast, central-west,
downs associated with heavy rainfall events have been and north regions. As seen in Table 2, the central-west
detected as forest disturbances by remote sensing, as re- and north regions are those where the population has
ported by Nelson et al. (1994) and Espirito-Santo et al. increased by a factor of around 10 in 60 yr, though their
(2010). These seem to be unidirectional wind events also population density is still the lowest. The north region
called downbursts or microbursts (Fujita 1981), which are includes the Amazon forest, which occupies most of the
intrinsically different from tornadoes, although in some area. In the central-west region the original savannah
cases they are as destructive. has been mostly replaced by agriculture in the last
A possible relationship between tornado location and 30 years with huge areas growing crops, such as soybeans,
topography has not been sought here. Certainly the par- corn, and cotton, and also grass for pasture.
ent thunderstorms have a preferred location of initiation
over the mountains but because of a lack of reliable data
on tornado lifetime and trajectory, no attempt has been
made to classify them according to altitude.
Several other features can be found in Fig. 2. Perhaps
the most outstanding is the increasing number of tornado
reports over the last three decades. Doswell et al. (1999)
observed that in the United States tornado reports in-
creased from 220 yr21 in the 1950s to 1200 yr21 in the
late 1990s. The increase is related to the more effective
observation of tornadoes resulting from several causes,
including increasing public awareness. The Brazilian
reports are just a small fraction of those in the U.S. case.
However, we can still ask why the number of reports in-
creased tenfold in three decades. From the personal ex-
perience of the author, the increase in the number of
tornado reports has already resulted in revisions of nu-
clear power plant and power line specifications in the FIG. 4. Percentage of all tornado and waterspout reports (%),
south and southeast regions of Brazil and risk assessment population density (number of inhabitants per square kilometer),
and affiliated TV Globo stations (number per 0.5 million km2) for
by insurance companies. In these cases the companies each of the five regions of Fig. 1. The vertical axis uses the units in
involved worked in the past from the premise that tor- parentheses. Population density and number of TV stations are for
nadoes did not happen in Brazil. To answer the question the years 2000 and 2008, respectively.
JULY 2011 SILVA DIAS
FIG. 5. Cumulative number of affiliated TV Globo local stations
per 0.5 million km2 for the five regions of Fig. 1.
Another fact to consider in the report of tornado
events is the evolution of the number of local television
stations, which was helped by the advent of communi-
cation satellites, as reported by Munhoz Rosario (2008).
Figure 5 shows the evolution of the number of TV
Globo local stations, per 0.5 million km 2, from 1965
until 2008. The area of 0.5 million km2 is approximately
the area of the south region (Table 2), the smallest of the
five regions.
The local stations provide a focal point for the dis-
semination of news and, in particular, tornado events. A
simple phone call will trigger a local news crew to visit
the reported area, and the occurrence will be in every
home by the time of the national evening news. This
is how a tornado report can easily be in the newspapers
and be registered on a Web site. Figure 5 shows how the
television coverage by local stations has increased in
the various regions of Brazil in the last four decades.
When comparing Figs. 2 and 6, we can see that the in-
creasing trend of affiliated TV Globo stations in the
south region precedes the increase in the number of
tornado reports by a few years, but the rate of increase
in tornado reports is higher after the mid-1990s, and it
increases again in the 2000s. For the southeast region,
in spite of the higher population density and a reason-
able coverage by local television stations, the increase
in tornado reports only increases after the 2000s, sup-
posedly because of the initiative leading to the Web site
(http://www.temposeveronobrasil.com). Table 3 shows
the evolution of tornado reports from this site (as of
December 2009) and from other sources, and it is
clearly seen that the Web site resulted in a considerable
increase in the number of tornado reports.
The northeast and central-west regions have a lower
number of tornado reports, even with the increase in
television coverage and Web site reporting. As discussed
213
FIG. 6. Number of tornadoes classified according to the F scale.
For countries other than Brazil, data have been extracted from
Brooks and Doswell (2001a, their Fig. 4). For Brazil see text for
details.
above, thunderstorms are seldom observed in the north-
east region. However, in the central-west region, partic-
ularly in its southern half, there is a frequency of intense
storms similar to the south region, according to Zipser
et al. (2006), and possibly more MCC than the south re-
gion according to Durkee and Mote (2010), so it is ex-
pected that a large number of tornadoes go unreported
because of both a low population density and a low
number of local television stations. In Fig. 4 the percent-
age of the total number of tornadoes reported in each
region is compared with the population density and the
number of television stations. Both the central-west and
north regions are seen as places where severe weather can
easily go undetected.
Table 4 shows the percentage of reports per region
and season. The south and southeast regions are those
with the highest number of reports, and consequently
TABLE 3. Sources or tornado reports (including waterspouts and
funnel clouds) for 5-yr intervals from 1964 to 2008. TempoSevero
refers to the Web site (http://www.temposeveronobrasil.com), and
‘‘other’’ refers to various articles in the scientific literature.
From 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004
To 1968 1973 1978 1983 1988 1993 1998 2003 2008
TempoSevero 6 90
Other 3 0 9 0 8 12 14 13 2
214 WEATHER, CLIMATE, AND SOCIETY
TABLE 4. Percentage of tornado and waterspout reports across
seasons for each region.
DJF MAM JJA SON
South 39 16 10 35
Southeast 28 55 8 10
Central-West 50 0 33 17
Northeast 29 14 14 43
North 0 13 63 25
the seasonal variation is more reliable. For the other
regions the seasonality may change if more reports are
added in the future, so no attempts to discuss them will
be made. It can be seen that the seasons with most tor-
nado reports in the south region are spring and summer,
while for the southeast region, fall has the majority of
the reports. Even though the low number of reports does
not provide reliable evidence, it is interesting to note
that for the north region most of the cases are for June–
August, which is the transition between the wet and the
dry season in the northern part of the north region. At
this time of the year, Alcântara et al. (2011) and Cohen
et al. (1995) report the occurrence of Amazonian squall
lines that propagate from the northern coast toward the
southeast with lifetimes that may reach 24–48 h. These
squall lines have been associated with damaging wind in
the region, so they may also be associated with tornado
occurrences.
A further examination of tornado intensity can be
made by grouping the reports in Table 1 into the various
categories of the F scale. Today in the United States, the
original F scale has been replaced by the enhanced Fujita
(EF) scale (McDonald and Metha 2006). However, the
reports used in this study all make references to the
original F scale, so no attempts will be made to relate to
the new scale, although it is undoubtedly a more con-
sistent form of registration. The new EF scale requires an
examination of the vulnerability of the structures affected
by the tornado, and this should be done just after the
episode and not years after the fact as is the case here.
Because of the comparatively small numbers of tor-
nado reports in Brazil, it is not meaningful to look into the
trends of tornado intensity as measured by the F scale.
However, it is still worthwhile to compare the number of
cases in each category with those in other countries in-
cluded in the work of Brooks and Doswell (2001a). For
this comparison, the cases in Table 1 that are classified as
F0/F1 and F1/F2 have been reassigned into the two
neighboring categories in the following two ways: 1) by
adding them into the lower-intensity category and 2) by
adding them into the upper category. The resulting
numbers have been labeled as Brazil 1 and Brazil 2, re-
spectively, and used in Fig. 6. Cases that are classified in
VOLUME 3
Table 1 as either a tornado or waterspout have all been
added to the F0 category. Figure 6 shows the plot of the
resulting numbers and compared them with the numbers
in Fig. 4 of Brooks and Doswell (2001a) for various
countries. For this comparison the Brazil cases have
been scaled in the same way as in Brooks and Doswell
(2001a), by attributing the number 100 to the F2 cate-
gory and adjusting the other categories accordingly.
The two cases for Brazil stand out by having a relatively
larger number of F0 cases when compared to other
countries. There are at least two reasons for that—one is
that the grouping of all cases labeled just ‘‘tornado’’ in
Table 1 may include some cases with higher intensities,
and the other reason is that, as a subtropical country,
Brazil may have more weak tornadoes than the other
countries that are used as comparison. The apparent lack
of proper classification of the tornado reports points
toward the need for an official registration of tornadoes
with a program for training observers in their classifi-
cation as is the case for the United States, reported by
Doswell et al. (1999). In section 5 this will be mentioned
again with respect to recommend actions to the weather
service.
4. Global and regional changes in the circulation
The analysis of the observed changes in the number of
tornado reports in Brazil would be incomplete if the
question as to whether at least part of the increase could
be a result of climate variability was not addressed.
Tornados are observed in association with deep con-
vective clouds, cumulonimbi, which are also responsible
for large amounts of rainfall. Rainfall has been exten-
sively studied for all regions in Brazil, and, in particular,
increasing trends over the last decades have been repor-
ted for the south and southeast regions of Brazil.
Of the five regions in Brazil only the south and per-
haps the southeast have enough tornado reports to allow
a more detailed interpretation of the causes of the ob-
served trends. These regions of Brazil are part of the La
Plata Basin (LPB), where a number of studies have in-
dicated that a change in rainfall has occurred since the
1970s. Boulanger et al. (2005) show that there are up-
ward trends in annual rainfall, with a maximum differ-
ence between 1976 and 2001, and from 1950 to 1974,
centered in the south region of Brazil around 288S lati-
tude. Liebmann et al. (2004) show an increasing trend
in annual rainfall of about 8 mm yr21 for the summer
season and a 40% increase in this trend from 1976 to
1999. They also mention that the increase is due to more
rainy days and more rain per event, and that the number
of extreme rainfall events more than doubled over the
same period. Penalba and Robledo (2010) showed that
JULY 2011 SILVA DIAS
larger increases in rainfall in the LPB in the last 50 yr
have occurred in the summer, spring, and fall, especially
for extreme events of daily rainfall. Interestingly, the
peak of tornado events in the south region is in spring and
summer, when, according to Table 4, 74% of the cases
were reported. In the southeast region 83% of the cases
occur in summer and fall.
However, the events of extreme daily rainfall do not
necessarily correspond to the systems associated with
severe weather that trigger tornado events. As far back
as Marwitz (1972), but also more recently in Doswell
(2001), the low efficiency of rainfall has been associated
with high values of wind shear and severe weather.
Basically when a cumulonimbus cloud grows in an envi-
ronment with strong shear, it will be subject to entrain-
ment of environmental air, which is usually cooler and
drier and will lead to the rapid evaporation of raindrops.
The entrainment of dry air will lead to the formation of
cloud-scale downdrafts and the potential formation of
damaging winds (e.g., James and Markowski 2010). Wind
shear is a feature that is more intense in midlatitudes than
in the tropics (e.g., Cotton and Anthes 1989), thus par-
tially explaining why the Midwest of the United States
has so many severe storms with associated tornadoes
while more tropical regions have fewer tornado events.
An investigation of the relationship between intense
storms and wind shear has been attempted by certain
authors. In the particular case of subtropical South
America, a good indication of the increase in wind shear
is the increase in speed of the upper-level jet and/or of
the lower-level jet, which are dominant features in the
MCC cases (Velasco and Fritsch 1987; Vera et al. 2006).
Carvalho et al. (2005) show that Pacific sea surface tem-
perature has an impact on the upper-level wind speed
over the south region, and Barros et al. (2002) discuss the
effect of this on both the upper- and lower-level jets.
However, an evaluation of the past trends of the wind
shear over the region appears to be lacking.
There is considerable discussion as to whether the ob-
served changes in rainfall, and possibly circulation, over
the south region of Brazil are due to natural climate
variability associated with multidecadal cycles related
to the Pacific and Indian Ocean sea surface temperature
evolution (Kayano and Andreoli 2007), or whether they
are already a manifestation of climate change. Anyway,
recent work by Carvalho et al. (2010), among others,
points to the early 1970s as a time when an abrupt change
in rainfall patterns was observed in the south region,
resulting in an enhancement of the moisture flux and
a significant change in the flow of the Paraná River. The
climatology of intense convective systems, such as those
by Zipser et al. (2006) and Durkee and Mote (2010), do
not cover a large enough time span to confirm the possible
215
effect of an enhanced moisture flux on storm severity.
However, according to Herdies et al. (2002), Nieto
Ferreira et al. (2003), and Salio et al. (2007), it can be
seen that when there is an enhancement of the mois-
ture flux to the south and southeast regions through the
low-level jet, this favors MCC formation and possibly
tornadoes.
From the review of the literature, it may be concluded
that there are in fact several changes in the climate con-
ditions of the south and southeast regions that favor the
occurrence of intense convective systems, as will be com-
mented on further in the next section.
5. Discussion and conclusions
As mentioned in most studies on the observed changes
in weather patterns, rainfall, or storm severity, the ques-
tion arises as to whether they are due to natural climate
variability or a climate change induced by global warm-
ing. Here we have shown the case of a tenfold increase
in tornado reports in Brazil, mainly in the south and
southeast regions, which is primarily due to the wide-
spread use of communications to report these occurrences,
a combination of an increase in number of local TV
stations and the use of the Internet to communicate and
register the cases. There is, however, a possibility that
the actual number of tornadoes has actually increased in
the south region after the 1970s as a result of a change in
global circulation induced by warming of the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. Whether such a change would actually
support a tenfold increase of tornado occurrences is
doubtful because in other parts of the world this has
not been reported according to the literature survey. Del
Genio et al. (2007) suggest that in a warmer climate in
the central-eastern United States little change will be seen
in severe storm occurrence with global warming, but they
point out that severe storms will occur more often. This
may also be the case for subtropical South America,
where Zipser et al. (2006) mention that there have been
record-breaking intense storms. However, because of the
large climate variability of the region, the attribution
of causes remains an unsolved problem.
From another point of view, it is plausible that a large
number of tornadoes still go unreported, mainly in the
north and central-west regions, where the population
density is low and coverage by local television stations
is not extensive enough to ensure detection of possible
cases indicated by satellite based studies of intense
storms.
The most obvious conclusion, and recommendation,
in this study is that there should be an official regis-
try of tornado reports in Brazil. The effect of a non-
governmental initiative of volunteers that decided to
216 WEATHER, CLIMATE, AND SOCIETY
keep a documentation of tornado reports has clearly
shown that tornadoes are more frequent in Brazil than
one could judge from the literature. And, if this is the
case, life and property are endangered, and these
threats should be addressed by the authorities.
Acknowledgments. The data from the website http://
www.temposeveronobrasil.com have been used with
permission. (This site may be temporarily unreachable
but contact information may be found at http://dawhois.
com/siteinfo/?query=temposeveronobrasil.com.) This
study has been supported by grants from FAPESP,
CAPES, and CNPq. My thanks to B. Biazetto for help
with the figures.
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