A Review of Weather Events of 2023

The year 2023 was very active, particularly through early August. While the region witnessed one of our warmest winters on record, we still managed a couple impactful wintry precipitation events during the last week of January. March roared in like a lion with a powerful storm system that led to severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, flooding, strong gradient winds of 50-70 mph, and the lowest barometric pressure on record in Paducah and Evansville. We witnessed an incredibly high number of windy days during the first several months. Our office ended up issuing a total of 12 wind advisories from January through April (records for wind advisories date back to 2006 and this was 3 more than the previous highest during the first 4 months of the year which was 9 in 2019). During the overnight hours on April 5th, an EF-2 tornado touched down in Bollinger County Missouri and unfortunately took the lives of 5 people as it tore through the town of Glenallen.

An extremely active pattern set up from late June through early August with multiple rounds of severe thunderstorms and flash flooding. The first round arrived over the weekend leading up to the 4th of July, when we issued 154 combined warnings over a 4 day period (breaking the previous 4 day record of 148 warnings set from April 24-27, 2011). This was followed by a historic flash flooding event on July 19th that produced a swath of rainfall amounts of 6 to 11 inches. Numerous Flash Flood Emergencies were issued and the Graves County mesonet site broke the Kentucky state 24-hour precipitation record picking up an incredible 11.28". Yet another flash flooding event occurred in early August, this time focused slightly further west across southeast Missouri and far west Kentucky. Despite starting off the summer with drought conditions developing from late May through June, parts of the region ended up observing one of our wettest summers on record thanks to the insane rainfall totals from July 1 - August 15. Anomalously high soil moisture levels in August helped contribute to record high humidity levels (dewpoints in the low to mid 80s) which produced heat index readings as high as 120 during our week-long heat wave from August 20-26.

We finally got a much needed break from the active weather September through November, with drought conditions redeveloping across much of the region. Record low water levels were observed along portions of the Mississippi River from New Madrid down to Memphis in October. As we neared the end of the year, a severe weather event occurred on December 9th across southern portions of west Kentucky. An EF-2 tornado left a path of damage across Todd County, Kentucky (part of a 48 mile long track which included EF-3 damage in Clarksville, TN). The year ended with a combined 647 warnings (severe thunderstorm, tornado, and flash flood) which was the 2nd most on record for a year dating back to 1995 (the record is 709 warnings issued in 2006).