Even with the deadly spate of tornadoes spawned this weekend, 2014 is still on pace to see one of the lowest recorded counts for a tornado season, scientists say. That it comes on the heels of one of the busiest seasons on records just a few years earlier is part of a trend in extreme variability that researchers are examining in an effort to determine the cause, including the potential influence of climate change.
The string of recent tornadoes that stretched from Arkansas to Georgia marked the end to a streak of 159 days without a tornado ranking an EF3 or higher on the Enhanced Fujita scale (which goes from 0 to 5). And after cataloging only 93 tornado reports through April 24, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center had tallied 87 reports alone on Monday.
The streak and dearth of tornado reports were indicators of how uneventful the 2014 season has been in its early parts, much like the 2013 season was. The past three seasons have all stood in stark contrast to the 2011 tornado season, which had the second highest tornado count on record.
All of the years since 2011 have actually seen relatively dampened activity in terms of tornado counts, a stark juxtaposition that seems to be following a trend of more extreme changes in tornado activity in recent years, Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at the SPC, and his colleague Harold Brooks have found. The pair is looking at whether climate change, among many other factors, could be playing a role in this and other tornado trends.
For much of the 2014 season, the overriding atmospheric pattern of cooler-than-normal conditions in the eastern U.S. has kept a lid on tornado formation, as the warm, moist air over the Gulf of Mexico was kept at bay. This warm air can flow in over the land surface and make the atmosphere unstable, as it is less dense than cooler air above and so it rises, a necessity to get the thunderstorm activity that produces tornadoes.
Read the entire article here: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/despite-spate-of-tornadoes-2014-on-track-for-low-total-17363
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