As this year's severe weather and tornado season approaches, the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a new report on the Web with a great deal of information and statistics about tornadoes.

The report, entitled "1998-1999 Tornadoes and a Long-Term Tornado Climatology," is available at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html,

The report, published by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., describes the 1998 and 1999 tornado seasons in detail, provides a list of all documented F5 (most violent category of the Fujita Scale) tornadoes from 1880-1999, and includes color maps of state-by-state long-term annual averages for tornadoes. For example, Oklahoma has the highest risk for strong to violent (F2-F5) tornadoes, with an annual average of 2.4 per 10,000 square miles. Also, the web page provides links to a number of other reports and sources of information.

For more information, please contact: questions@ncdc.noaa.gov or 828-271-4800.