Tornado alley is expanding — and scientists don’t know why (states, year)
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Tornadoes are becoming more frequent in populated parts of the United States and are often occurring as damaging clusters.
The changes in tornado behavior overall represent a major meteorological mystery.
"Tornado numbers have been pretty consistent as long as we’ve been keeping records," Harold Brooks, NOAA.
Tornadoes are expanding in space and time
Over the past 30 years tornadoes have begun to cluster, with far more months with either zero tornadoes — and far more punctuated by series of devastating storm complexes which may drop dozens. In the last 20 years, the U.S. has set 8 monthly records for the most tornadoes per month — and 7 for the fewest. “On days when tornadoes occur, more of them per event — and they’re occurring more often further east,” said Bunting of the Storm Prediction Center.
Rather, “tornado alley is expanding,” he said.
Brooks emphasized that the change in tornado patterns don’t yet rise to the level where individuals should change their migration decisions because of them.
For emergency managers in, say, central Tennessee, a 10 percent increase in tornadoes — while insignificant on the individual scale — is a substantially increased threat, leading to substantially increased costs, Brooks said.
That threat is magnified by the fact that while Western cities like Topeka, Kansas, or Amarillo, Texas may look roughly like their Eastern counterparts, the rural hinterlands of eastern states are far, far more densely populated. While a tornado 10 miles outside of Lubbock, Texas may do little damage, a tornado outside similarly-sized Birmingham, Ala., risks devastating many smaller communities.
Tornado alley is expanding — and scientists don’t know why
My thinking is that weather and climate on Earth varies over very long time periods. We take measurements over 200 years to try and understand weather cycles that may measure in the thousands of years.
It's like watching the DOW for 5 days to predict year-end returns.
I am pretty skeptical of this kind of stuff. Everyone knows only a certain % of tornadoes are actually recorded as such and that % has gone up considerably over the years with (a) more population (b) everyone having a camera (c) radar technology being increasingly accurate in identifying tornadic circulations.
I do believe there's more or less random fluctuation both in frequency and location patterns. We've seen a time stretch where Central OK and North TX got relatively few violent tornadoes and there's more action in the South both earlier and later in the year than the classic April/May window, but then no-one can quite explain why the 1950s saw some very brutal tornadoes in the North and since then some of those states have not seen much in the way of them. It's been over 10 years since Michigan has even seen an EF-3. The last F4 happened 45+ years ago. Similarly it's going on 30 years since Wisconsin had its last F4. PA saw 7 violent tornadoes on one day - May 31st 1985 - they had seen one before and they've seen one since. And it's been 25 years since the last one.
Given that kind of randomness and the small numbers involved, i think it's probably fair to say that it's very difficult to arrive at causal relationships to explain them.
Hey! I even surprised myself...that was not a stupid ques...I googled it:
''The United States has the most tornadoes of any country. Many of these form in an area of the central United States known as Tornado Alley. This area extends into Canada, particularly the prairie provinces and Ontario."
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