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Dixie Alley is a nickname sometimes given to areas of the southern United States that are particularly vulnerable to strong or violent tornadoes. This is distinct from the better known Tornado Alley.

Description

Dixie Alley includes areas of the lower Mississippi Valley, including the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, the upper Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama, and Georgia. Tornadoes are less frequent in these states than they are in the southern Plains. However, Alabama and Mississippi have reported more tornado fatalities than the Plains states (except for much-larger Texas). This is in part due to the relatively high number of strong/violent long tracked, tornadoes and higher population density of this region. According to the National Climatic Data Center, for the period January 1, 1950 – October 31, 2006, Alabama (along with Kansas) reported more F5 tornadoes than any other state.

According to a research made in 2007 by Dr. Walker Ashley in the American Meteorological Society, a number of factors explained the higher number of tornado fatalities in the Dixie Alley area. Dr. Ashley stated that the south is more susceptible to nighttime killer tornadoes, that it has the highest percentage of manufactured homes in the US (where 63% of the overall fatalities occur), that there are more heavily forested areas, that there is a lack of a focused tornado season which can lead to complacency indicating that it has tornadoes much earlier than the national peak (May and June). After the Super Tuesday tornado outbreak in February 2008 that hit the Dixie Alley killing 57, many people indicated that they had minimized the threat of severe weather on that day since it was well before the peak of the tornado season.Complicating matters is that tornadoes are rarely visible in this area as they are more likely to be embedded in shafts of heavy rain, and that the hilly topography makes them difficult to see. ^[1]

References

• http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jan/dixieAlley/img0.html