Tornadoes and climate change: What a warming world means for deadly twisters and the type of storms that spawn them It was written by: Ernest Agee, Purdue University. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. This article was updated April 6, 2022, with more severe storms and tornadoes across the South.
The main ingredient a quiet storm full#
While scientists don’t have a full picture of the role climate change may be playing, we can certainly say we live in a warmer climate, and that a warming climate provides many of the ingredients for severe storms. The dry line can be a boundary for convection – the rising of warm air and sinking of colder air that can fuel storms. and the drier Western U.S., historically around the 100th meridian, has shifted eastward by about 140 miles since the late 1800s. Research by other scientists suggests that the dry line between the wetter Eastern U.S. In the Great Plains, drier air in the western boundary of traditional Tornado Alley probably has something to do with the fact that tornadoes are a declining risk in Oklahoma while wildfire risk is growing. At the same time, we found an increase in tornado numbers in what’s been dubbed Dixie Alley, extending from Mississippi through Tennessee and Kentucky into southern Indiana. We found a notable decrease in both the total number of tornadoes and days with tornadoes in the traditional Tornado Alley in the central plains. Mean number of days per year with a tornado registering EF1 strength or greater within 25 miles, 1986-2015. Other research since then has found similar shifts. In 2016, my students and I published the first paper that clearly showed, statistically, the emergence of another center of tornado activity in the Southeast, centered around Alabama. The Southeast seems to be getting a lot more severe storms. He and his family got to safety just before the tornado hit. A few years ago, I had a student who was on his family’s farm when he got a text warning that a tornado was coming. Social media also plays a big role today. People also know what to do now and are more likely to get warnings, and more homes have safe rooms able to withstand a tornado. That’s based on scientific knowledge and technology able to target where conditions conducive to tornadoes are developing. If you look at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center website, you’ll see eight-day outlooks now. Scientists can now anticipate and forecast areas where tornadoes may develop. So, as bad as these new outbreaks are, science and technology are saving lives at a faster rate than storms are killing people. What’s interesting is that despite that increase, the per capita death toll from tornadoes has actually gone down in the latter half of the past 100 years. While it’s still hard for climate models to assess something as small as a tornado, they do project increases in severe weather. The 2011 outbreak in Alabama was another.Īll of this unfolds under the umbrella of global warming. The December 2021 outbreak, with more than 60 tornadoes that swept across Kentucky and neighboring states, came from a supercell. The most intense and longest-lasting tornadoes tend to come from what are known as supercells – powerful rotating thunderstorms. Studies do show tornadoes getting more frequent, more intense and more likely to come in swarms. Why do tornado outbreaks seem to be getting more frequent and intense? Is climate change playing a role?
Thunderstorms capable of spinning off tornadoes typically develop along and ahead of a frontal boundary – where warm and cold air masses meet – often accompanied above by a strong jet stream. The right combination of heat, moisture and wind can develop rotating thunderstorms capable of spinning off a tornado or a tornado family. The recipe for a tornado requires a few important ingredients: low-level heat and moisture and cold air aloft, coupled with a favorable wind field that increases in speed with height, as well as changes in the wind direction in the lower levels.
When atmospheric conditions favor the development of severe storms, tornadoes can form. Think of the thunderstorm as the parent of the tornado. tornado activity has shifted eastward from the traditional Tornado Alley in recent years. We asked tornado scientist Ernest Agee to explain what causes tornadoes and how the center of U.S. Severe storms have damaged homes from Texas to Florida, and north to South Carolina and Georgia in recent weeks. The March numbers, still preliminary, would be a record for the month, though detection has also improved. Tornadoes and severe storms swept across the South in early April 2022, following a deadly and destructive March when over 200 tornadoes were reported. Brent Koops/NOAA Weather in Focus Photo Contest 2015, CC BY-ND tornado activity, once Tornado Alley, has shifted eastward.
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