Lull in Severe Weather
December 6th, 2012 at 9:31 pm by Jonathan Conder under Weather
Courtesy Greg Carbin of the Storm Prediction Center
Either people are heeding the warnings from the National Weather Service when it comes to tornadoes, or mother nature is taking a break. Above is a graph showing the maximum number of days between tornado fatalities in the United States, from Greg Carbin of the Storm Prediction Center.
This is not the longest stretch, this was 197 days, ending on February 28th, 1987 and yes, fatal tornadoes can happen any time of the year, even in February.
Actually, the 2012 severe weather season started out very strong, but turned anemic very quickly. Check out this chart:
Courtesy the Storm Prediction Center
This is a plot of the 2011 and 2012 tornado seasons compared to average. Notice that 2011 ended with almost 400 tornadoes above average and 2012 will likely end the year with almost 400 tornadoes below average.
That being said, if global warming or climate change is causing more violent storms, where are they?
If you are interested in finding other interesting facts about tornadoes, you can follow the Storm Prediction Center on Facebook here.
There’s never been anything in the scientific literature that has said that global warming would cause more tornadoes. There’s been some research that suggests that the frequency of environments favorable for severe thunderstorms will increase and that it’s likely that a greater fraction of those environments would be associated with non-tornadic winds (as opposed to hail or tornadic storms), but the impact on the number of tornadoes has not been assessed. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169809512000968 for a review.
Harold, thanks for the reply. Even though there has not been a lot a scientific research in the correlation between climate change and tornadic activity, there are dozens of articles by global warming proponents that there is a direct correlation. Again, thanks for comment, I always appreciate intellectual dialogue. Jonathan Conder
I’m not sure what you mean by “global warming proponents”, but there are lots of things online that claim that warming will make tornadoes worse and/or more frequent and just about as many that claim that warming would make tornadoes not as bad and/or less frequent. I’m not sure which argument has been made more often.