Czech Hydrometeorological Institute - Czech Republic
When reporting about Czech tornadoes at the Toulouse 2000 conference, some of the statements presented there by the first author were that "the average rate of tornadoes is about 1 tornado day per year", that "the awareness of tornadoes by the general public still remains rather very low", and that "the actual rate could be somewhat higher". Moreover, an upcoming three-year (2000-2002) national project aimed at severe storms was introduced briefly there.
It was primarily the effort associated with the aforementioned project (supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic), in conjunction with noticeable enhancement of awareness of tornadoes by the general public that dramatically changed the Czech tornado statistics in the years 2000 and 2001. While in the year 2000, a total of 5 tornado days (a day with one or more documented tornadoes; in this case each of these 5 days has one documented tornado), 2 cases of possible (but not documented) tornadoes on other days, and 1 funnel cloud were recorded, the year 2001 brought 3 tornado days (with total of 8 documented tornadoes), 4 cases of questionable tornadoes (on other days), and 5 documented funnel clouds. The most significant of these were the May 31st, 2001 case of an F3 tornado in vicinity of the Sázava River (causing an almost 0.5 km wide and about 5 km long damage swath), and the July 20th, 2001 tornado outbreak case in central Moravia. Some of the 2001 events were photographed, and 4 of them recorded on video.
A summary of all known cases from the Czech region, together with brief information and photographs for some of the cases, can be found at http://www.chmi.cz/torn. These pages, the first version of which appeared in mid-1996, undoubtedly played a significant role in increasing the nation's tornado awareness. Besides the general tornado information (in Czech) and tornado statistics, contact addresses, instructions about what to observe if one happens to be in the vicinity of a tornado, and safety instructions can be found here. The impact of these pages is made evident by fact that for several 2000 and 2001 cases, the first information about tornado occurrence reached meteorologists by e-mail or SMS messages shortly after the event.
Besides tornadoes, other significant non-tornadic phenomena associated with severe convective storms have been documented within the national project - namely, downbursts and microbursts, heavy hailstorms and flash floods. All of these cases will be included within a database for future studies.
A short comparison of the Czech tornado statistics with neighboring countries will be presented at the conference, discussing similarities and/or differences. It is likely that the differences depend mainly not on the climatology itself, but rather on the "tornado-attitude" of the national weather services (or other weather-oriented institutions) of particular countries and on the communications infrastructure within each country.