Quote Originally Posted by SoonerDave View Post
This X 1000.

I was down in Orlando for vacation a few years ago, and afternoon summer thunderstorms are as common there as teenage acne. They usually pop up, dump a pile of rain and thunder, then move on. However, one day while we were there, one storm moved over Orlando and headed toward Cape Kennedy, and apparently a little impulse in the Gulf gave this particular storm quite a boost such that it started rotating, and it dropped a tornado along the beach near there. Local weather there did not go wall-to-wall; there was no on-the-ground tracking; one station cut into local TV with a general radar location of the tornado. Only after the storm had passed into the Atlantic did they find that the tornado, while trivial in size and scope compared to what we just went through up here, did considerable damage in that area (including some to the space center, but I don't recall with certainty).

All that is to say that the intensity of tornado coverage and warning in other parts of the country just isn't like it is here. Florida is geared up for hurricanes with multiple days of notice, not tornadoes that spin up out of storms in just a few minutes.
Good point about Florida. They actually experience more tornadoes than Oklahoma does in numbers. The difference is most of their tornadoes are of the 'weak' variety. They are much easier to live with than the F4/F5 tornadoes we get in Oklahoma.