Tornadoes Are Coming in Bunches. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why. The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing.
Tornadoes Are Coming in Bunches. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why. The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing.
The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing.
While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet’s rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes’ clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.
“The link between climate change and tornadoes is still pretty tenuous,” Dr. Fricker said. “It’s a really open and difficult question for us.” One difficulty is that tornadoes are too small on a planetary scale, and too ephemeral, to show up in the global mathematical models that scientists use to study climate change.
My state of Ohio, as of April 22nd, has had 35 confirmed tornadoes (and I know there are quite a few still to be officially added). The average for the ENTIRE YEAR is 22. We had 57 last year. Something is not OK....
I think it's because we just don't burn enough clean coal.
gee girls what could it possibly be
Unhealthy miasma
Gonna go get my healing crystals, brb.
It's because of Woke, of course.
Viral marketing for that new movie is wild
They do move in herds!
Tenuous? There has been plenty of research done, I’ll link a few below. Not to mention the obvious, there’s more energy going into an energetic system. Increasing temperature also increases the amount of humidity the air can hold. Convective available potential energy and lifted condensation levels (CAPE and LCL - energy and humidity/dew point) are two important pieces of the combined “significant tornado parameter” used in mesoscale discussions.
Changes in Convective Available Potential Energy and Convective Inhibition under Global Warming
Over the United States, Diffenbaugh et al. (2013) and Seeley and Romps (2015a) found robust increases in CAPE from 1970–99 to 2070–99 under RCP8.5 scenarios using CMIP5 models. CAPE and the related vertical velocity (√2*CAPE) were also found to increase over east of the Rockies from late twentieth century to late twenty-first century in other modeling studies (i.e., Del Genio et al. 2007; Trapp et al. 2007; Van Klooster and Roebber 2009; Brooks 2013).
Over eastern Australia, Allen et al. (2014)found increased CAPE from 1980–2000 to 2079–99 due to increased moisture under high emissions scenarios using two global climate models.
In the tropics, Seeley and Romps (2015b)found dramatically increased buoyancy in the upper troposphere and thus increased CAPE under increasing sea surface temperatures from their idealized simulations under the radiative-convective equilibrium (Romps 2014).
Romps (2016) further predicted about 6%–7% increases in CAPE per 1°C surface warming of the current tropics.
Other cloud-resolving simulations (Romps 2011; Muller et al. 2011; Singh and O’Gorman 2013) and global climate model simulations (Sobel and Camargo 2011) also showed increasing CAPE in response to surface warming in the tropics and other regions, including increased extreme CAPE values across the tropics and subtropics (Singh et al. 2017).
Yes, but it's not at all obvious why that set of things would change the temporal distribution of tornado formation in this way without increasing their quantity.
I really don’t get why you argue with every comment on the articles you post, this is at least the third time you’ve gone out of the way to discourage a comment I’ve tried to make, in communities that could really use the engagement.
The article is paywalled and you quoted that block about the tenuous link directly, seeming to imply it was meaningful or warranting discussion.
I've lived in the same part of Ohio my entire life (I'm 28) and in the entire time I've lived here we had exactly 1 tornado touch down in the county. Within the past two years alone we've had at least 4 in the state and two of which I ended up driving through by accident.
We're all so fucked it's unreal.
Got like 4 tornados within an hour of each other last night in Huntsville.
Certainly not loving it.
They do move in herds!