Tornadoes: Has extreme weather increased in recent years?

Has extreme weather increased in recent years? The science is still unsettled on whether climate change has resulted in more intense hurricanes, so let's restrict our attention to tornadoes and heavy rain. There is evidence that global warming has caused an increase in very heavy precipitation events--the kind most responsible for major floods. However, there is no evidence that climate change has caused in increase in tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, though preliminary research suggests this may occur late this century.

Tornadoes

Are tornadoes and severe thunderstorms getting more numerous and more extreme due to climate change? To help answer this question, let's restrict our attention to the U.S., which has the highest incidence of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms of any place in the world. At a first glance, it appears that tornado frequency has increased in recent decades (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The number of tornadoes reported in the U.S. since 1950. Image credit: High Plains Regional Climate Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Source.

However, this increase may be entirely caused by factors unrelated to climate change:

1. Population growth has resulted in more tornadoes being reported.
2. Advances in weather radar, particularly the deployment of about 100 Doppler radars across the U.S. in the mid-1990s, has resulted in a much higher tornado detection rate.
3. Tornado damage surveys have grown more sophisticated over the years. For example, we now commonly classify multiple tornadoes along a damage path that might have been attributed to just one twister in the past.

Given these uncertainties in the tornado data base, it is unknown how the frequency of tornadoes might be changing over time. The "official word" on climate science, the 2007 United Nations IPCC report, stated it thusly: "There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in small scale phenomena such as tornadoes, hail, lighting, and dust storms."

Furthermore, we're not likely to be able to develop methods to improve the situation in the near future.The current Doppler radar system can only detect the presence of a parent rotating thunderstorm that often, but not always, produces a tornado. Until a technology is developed that can reliably detect all tornadoes, there is no hope of determining how tornadoes might be changing in response to a changing climate. According to Doswell (2007): I see no near-term solution to the problem of detecting detailed spatial and temporal trends in the occurrence of tornadoes by using the observed data in its current form or in any form likely to evolve in the near future.

Violent tornadoes are not increasing

Violent tornadoes (EF4 and EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, or F4 and F5 on the pre-2007 Fujita Scale), though rare, cause a large fraction of the tornado deaths reported each year. These storms are less likely to go uncounted, since they tend to cause significant damage along a long track. Thus, the climatology of violent tornadoes may offer a clue as to how climate change may be affecting severe weather. Unfortunately, we cannot measure the wind speeds of a tornado directly, except in very rare cases when researchers happen to be present with sophisticated research equipment. Tornadoes are categorized using the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, which is based on damage. So, if a violent tornado happens to sweep through empty fields and never destroy any structures, it will never be rated as a violent tornado. Thus, if the number of violent tornadoes has actually remained constant over the years, we should expect to see some increase in these storms over the decades, since more buildings have been erected in the paths of tornadoes.

However, if we look at the statistics of violent U.S. tornadoes since 1950 (Figure 2), there does not appear to be any increase in the number of these storms. In fact, there was only one tornado of EF5 intensity reported during the eight year period 2000-2007, the tornado that devastated Greensburg, Kansas in 2007 (although Canada did report its first EF5 tornado in history on June 22, 2007). The previous eight year period of 1992-1999 had six F5 tornadoes, so we can't say that climate change has caused an increase in the strongest tornadoes in recent years. Note that the EF scale to rate tornadoes was adopted in 2007, but the transition to this new scale still allows valid comparisons of tornadoes rated EF5 on the new scale and F5 on the old scale.

Figure 2. The incidence of violent (EF4/EF5, or F4/F5) tornadoes by decade since 1950. The asterisk by the decade of the 2000s indicates that the statistics extend only through February 2008. We can expect that another 20% of this decade's violent tornado activity will occur in 2008 and 2009.

The future of tornadoes

An alternate technique to study how climate change may be affecting tornadoes is look at how the large-scale environmental conditions favorable for tornado formation have changed through time. Moisture, instability, lift, and wind shear are needed for tornadic thunderstorms to form. The exact mix required varies considerably depending upon the situation, and is not well understood. However, Brooks (2003) attempted to develop a climatology of weather conditions conducive for tornado formation by looking at atmospheric instability (as measured by theConvective Available Potential Energy, or CAPE), and the amount of wind shear between the surface and 6 km altitude. High values of CAPE and surface to 6 km wind shear are conducive to formation of tornadic thunderstorms. The regions they analyzed with high CAPE and high shear for the period 1997-1999 did correspond pretty well with regions where significant (F2 and stronger) tornadoes occurred. The authors plan to extend the climatology back in time to see how climate change may have changed the large-scale conditions conducive for tornado formation.

Del Genio et al.(2007) used a climate model with doubled CO2 to show that a warming climate would make the atmosphere more unstable (higher CAPE) and thus prone to more severe weather. However, decreases in wind shear offset this effect, resulting in little change in the amount of severe weather in the Central and Eastern U.S. late this century. The speed of updrafts in thunderstorms over land increased by about 1 m/s in their simulation, though, since upward moving air needed to travel 50-70 mb higher to reach the freezing level. As a result, the most severe thunderstorms got stronger. In the Western U.S., the simulation showed that drying led lead to fewer thunderstorms, but the strongest thunderstorms increased in number by 26%, leading to a 6% increase in the total amount of lighting hitting the ground each year. If these results are correct, we might expect more lightning-caused fires in the Western U.S. late this century, due to enhanced drying and more lightning.

Using a high-resolution regional climate model (25 km grid size) zoomed in on the U.S., Trapp et al. (2007) found that the decrease in 0-6 km wind shear in the late 21st century would more than be made up for by an increase in instability (CAPE). Their model predicted an increase in the number of days with high severe storm potential for almost the entire U.S., by the end of the 21st century. These increases were particularly high for many locations in the Eastern and Southern U.S., including Atlanta, New York City, and Dallas (Figure 3). Cities further north and west such as Chicago saw a smaller increase in the number of severe weather days.

Figure 3. Number of days per year with high severe storm potential historically (blue bars) and as predicted by the climate model (A2 scenario) of Trapp et al. 2007 (red bars).

Summary

We currently do not know how tornadoes and severe thunderstorms may be changing due to changes in the climate, nor is there hope that we will be able to do so in the foreseeable future. Preliminary research using climate models suggests that we may see an increase in the number of severe storms capable of producing tornadoes late this century. However, this research is just beginning, and much more study is needed to confirm these findings. The lack of an increase in violent EF4 and EF5 tornadoes in recent decades implies that climate change has not yet increased tornado activity.

Heavy precipitation

Are heavy rain events becoming more frequent due to climate change? That is a difficult question to answer, since reliable records are not available at all in many parts of the world, and extend back only a few decades elsewhere. However, we do have a fairly good set of precipitation records for many parts of the globe, and those records show that the heaviest types of rains--those likely to cause flooding--have increased in recent years. According to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, "The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas". Indeed, global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events. As the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3% per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was "primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases". This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

More water vapor equals more precipitation

This increase in water vapor has very likely led to an increase in global precipitation. For instance, over the U.S., where we have very good precipitation records, annual average precipitation has increased 7% over the past century (Groisman et al., 2004). The same study also found a 14% increase in heavy (top 5%) and 20% increase in very heavy (top 1%) precipitation events over the U.S. in the past century. Kunkel et al. (2003) also found an increase in heavy precipitation events over the U.S. in recent decades, but noted that heavy precipitation events were nearly as frequent at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, though the data is not as reliable back then. Thus, there is a large natural variation in extreme precipitation events.

Pollution may contribute to higher precipitation

It is possible that increased pollution is partly responsible for the increase in precipitation and in heavy precipitation events in some parts of the world. According to Bell et al. (2008), summertime rainfall over the Southeast U.S. is more intense on weekdays than on weekends, with Tuesdays having 1.8 times as much rain as Saturdays during the 1998-2005 period analyzed. Air pollution particulate matter also peaks on weekdays and has a weekend minimum, making it likely that pollution is contributing to the observed mid-week rainfall increase. Pollution particles act as "nuclei" around which raindrops condense, increasing precipitation in some storms.

The future of flooding

It is difficult to say if the increase in heavy precipitation events in recent years has led to more flooding, since flooding is critically dependent on how much the landscape has been altered by development, upstream deforestation, and what kind of flood control devices are present. One of the few studies that did attempt to quantify flooding (Milly et al., 2002) found that the incidence of great floods has increased in recent decades. In the past century, the world's 29 largest river basins experienced a total of 21 "100-year floods"--the type of flood one would expect only once per 100 years in a given river basin. Of these 21 floods, 16 occurred in the last half of the century (after 1953). With the IPCC predicting that heavy precipitation events are very likely to continue to increase, it would be no surprise to see flooding worsen globally in the coming decades.

Jeff Masters