Tornados
Tornados are showing up in places they normally don’t and becoming more severe, but unlike hurricanes and wildfires, the connection between worsening tornados and human-caused global warming is unclear.
Read a round-up of the headlines:
“There’s likely a connection between the storms that California has experienced and this week’s tornadoes. The atmospheric rivers and the rain they brought probably helped lead to increased moisture in the air, which enabled the recent tornadoes to form in the region, says Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Michigan. “You’ve got the conditions for instability set up by these atmospheric rivers,” Samson told Vox.
The increased intensity of atmospheric rivers may also have links to climate change, many climate experts say. It’s too early to draw conclusions about the relationship between climate change and the tornadoes, however. “You can’t tie it to climate change, because it’s a one-off thing,” says Jase Bernhardt, a professor of geology, environment, and sustainability at Hofstra University.
What is more established, though, is that it’s unusual for the Los Angeles area to experience this type of weather phenomena at this magnitude. “This is stuff you see in Ohio, Arkansas … Not Montebello,” one witness said, according to CNN.”
Vox, Yes, there was just a tornado near Los Angeles. Is climate change to blame?
“Rural communities in western Mississippi are surveying and cleaning up the damage after an unusual and powerful tornado tore through the area Friday night…
People following the devastating news out of the region may be wondering: (How) was the storm related to climate change?…
Scientists know that warm weather is a key ingredient in tornadoes and that climate change is altering the environment in which these kinds of storms form. But they can't directly connect those dots, as the research into the link between climate and tornadoes still lags behind that of other extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfire.”
NPR, The exact link between tornadoes and climate change is hard to draw. Here's why
“Global warming is just one symptom of the larger problem of climate change. Climate change has also caused an increase in extreme weather events all over the world. “Extreme weather events” is a catch-all term for a variety of very different weather phenomena, some of which are easier to attribute to climate change than others. For example, scientists can say with a high degree of certainty that a warming planet will lead to more severe droughts in some areas and heavier rainfall in others. Unfortunately, other weather events, such as tornadoes, are much harder for climatologists to predict.
Tornadoes Are Changing
Predicting whether climate change will have an effect on the frequency and power of tornadoes is a challenge.
For all their destructive fury, tornadoes are relatively small when compared to some other extreme weather events. Hurricanes, for example, can span hundreds of miles, whereas the biggest tornado ever recorded measured 4.2 kilometers (2.6 miles) wide. They are also very short lived, lasting from a few seconds to a few hours as opposed to days or weeks at a time. This makes them very difficult to model in the climate simulations that scientists use to project the effects of climate change.
Instead, scientists must attempt to predict how climate change might affect the individual weather “ingredients” that support the development of supercell thunderstorms (the type that produce tornadoes). These weather ingredients are:
warm, moist air;
an unstable atmosphere; and
wind at different levels moving in different directions at different speeds, a phenomenon known as wind shear.”
National Geographic, Tornadoes and Climate Change
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