A home is destroyed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi after being hit by a tornado on Jan 21, 2017. [Photo/IC]

While the central part of the US has a fairly defined tornado season — the spring — the risk of tornadoes "never really goes to zero" for most of the year in the southeast, said Patrick Marsh of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

January tornado outbreaks are rare but not unprecedented, particularly in the South. Data from the Storm Prediction Center shows that, over the past decade, the nation has seen an average 38 tornadoes in January, ranging from a high of 84 in 2008 to just four in 2014.

The last time the prediction center issued a high-risk weather outlook — where forecasters are very confident of a tornado outbreak — was in 2014. Sunday marked only the third time since 2000 that any part of Florida had been at a high-risk for severe weather, Marsh said.

"This is a pretty rare event in this location," Marsh said.

If the storm fatalities reported so far this year — four each in Alabama and Mississippi and the 11 in Georgia — are all attributed to twisters, this January's death toll would be worse than 1999. That year, 18 people died in series of storms in Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee.