We've noted before in these pages that weather patterns are changing around the world, from parts of northern Europe having Miami-like summer days to storm intensities and resultant flooding increasing. Well, here's another one: tornado patterns are changing in the US.
Here's the gist from a recent article in Vox:
More tornadoes are now concentrated in fewer days, meaning they are less spread out and there's a higher number occurring on the same day, according to a 2019 study published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. A growing number of tornadoes are also occurring in the southeastern part of the US in addition to the Great Plains, where they have historically been most common.
The big threat is from a new phenomenon called tornado "clustering." Clustering results in more extensive and widespread damage in the areas unlucky enough to be hit. In terms of damage patterns, we're looking at a greater impact on infrastructure. Normally, we expect tornadoes to carve a path of destruction about the width of a football field, like a knife through a sheet cake. But a tornado cluster creates a larger field of destruction in a given area, more like a derecho* windstorm, making recovery slower and more difficult across the affected area.
The larger point in terms of managing environmental exposures is that weather-related risks are changing in so many ways that we're now required to rethink both risk reduction and recovery planning. London, a city notably deficient in modern HVAC systems, had a number of days over 30°C (around 90°F) last summer, just part of what meteorologists now tell us was the hottest summer in the last 2,000 years. Climate-related catastrophes just in the US amounted to some $92.9 billion in damages during the same period.
Every kind of weather seems to be changing in recent years. Droughts, record snowfalls, heat, wind, floods of every stripe — now even the tornadoes are acting in new and even more dangerous ways. We begin to wonder: Was the series of Sharknado movies silly SciFi fantasy or a soon-to-be-proven prediction?
* The fact that we all know what a derecho is nowadays is one clear marker of how weather has changed recently.
Author
Dr. Gary Anderberg
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