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I heard an item on the radio where the twin twisters that clobbered a Nebraska community were said to be described by meteorologists as rare; the question "Is this due to climate change?" was also posed and left dangling. Investigating further at Google News, I found another item where a storm chaser was saying "I've never seen anything like this".
I then found an article by Andrew Freedman which says there's a wide range of tornado types and that storms which split aren't all that rare.
Pioneering tornado scientist Theodore Fujita, who devised the Fujita Tornado Damage Scale that is still used to classify tornado intensity, identified many types of tornadoes, some of which bore similarities to the twin twisters in Nebraska on Monday.
For example, the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1965, during which nearly 50 tornadoes touched down and 271 people died, there was a well-documented dual tornado that struck close to Toledo, Ohio. A study Fujita published with his colleagues found that this tornado split for only a short time, coalescing back into a larger funnel soon after a famous picture was taken that bears some resemblance to the Pilger tornado.
"A single funnel split into two and then reorganized into one after about a minute," the study says.
Interesting reading.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 19 2014, @04:07PM
Yes, more needs to be said:
- How many tornadoes are happening? Is there a long-term trend?
- Where are they happening most often? What kinds of characteristics of topography or location would make an area more or less prone to tornadoes? (You might not know why yet, but you can at least document what)
- What is the best advice for somebody who is caught without shelter near a tornado? Which way should they try to run, what's the best place to hunker down, etc.
- What building designs withstand tornadoes the best?
I can keep going, the point is that these are the kinds of questions that led to us figuring out what is and what isn't a good idea to do to deal with lightning (also highly unpredictable and violent, and once thought to be directed be a deity), and there's no reason to think that asking them about tornadoes is a bad idea.
If you're upset because of the global warming argument, and you don't believe in global warming, I can't help you, because you've already made up your mind about it. But if it's just that you think global warming is invoked inappropriately, consider this argument:
1. Global warming leads to warmer summer climate.
2. Because thunderstorms develop in hot and humid air, warmer summer climate means more hot air means more thunderstorms.
3. Tornadoes form most commonly in thunderstorms, so more thunderstorms potentially means more tornadoes.
Is that watertight? No, but it's not wild speculation either.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday June 19 2014, @11:59PM
Here ya go:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends [noaa.gov]
The number of tornadoes goes up and down; we've just had a peak; but there was an equal peak back in 1973, which makes it a poor match for the ol' hockey-stick.
However, there's been a downward trend in 'strong to violent' tornadoes. If one assumes a correlation that with the hockey-stick, it seems higher temps mean *fewer* strong tornadoes.
I would hazard that our modern detection methods are more accurate, so tornadoes that might have been missed 50 or 100 years ago are now being counted.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday June 20 2014, @03:47AM
Heard a meteorologist talking about the tornado in Ontario, rare but not unheard of, and she blamed it on a cold front, the same cold front that caused the twin tornadoes IIRC. So perhaps warming temperatures will mean less but I doubt it. More likely it'll just move them slightly north. For most places the climate change is very small and many of the effects that are blamed on it are just natural variation. Long term who knows, perhaps tornadoes will become common in the Northwest Territories where IIRC there is a lot of flat land.