A Brief Tornado of a Story.

Source: NOAA

During a week of devastating news for the planet, following the 2021 IPCC report, heat waves have swept through the northwestern and ravaged the northeast. But a lesser-known occurrence happened just weeks prior, and it might surprise you.

The Northeast, not a place known for tornados. In fact, most states in this corridor of the US report a low single-digit average annual number of tornadoes. But in late July, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were rocked by a series of ten tornadoes in the span of just a day. They stretched from eastern Pennsylvania to the Atlantic ocean on the Jersey shore.

Terrifying video footage from inside a Car Dealership as a tornado hit:

Along the route of the tornadoes, homes were destroyed, buildings were ruined, and lives were altered. In New Hope, Pennsylvania, an entire car dealership was ramshackled in a matter of seconds as the tornado blew through. This has got me thinking, will tornadoes be more common in places where they were once rare?

The truthful answer to this, according to Scientific American, is that we don’t know. Science hasn’t been able to figure out the effect of warmer and wetter air on tornadoes. The increase in temperature that is associated with climate change isn’t correlated to an increase in tornadoes. For example, Brazil has high temperatures, but it doesn’t see frequent tornadoes and in the Tornado Alley, Oklahoma and Texas don’t have their tornado season in the hottest months of July and August.

Source: AccuWeather.

Another interesting aspect to this question is that the places where the tornado hit were very suburbanized and those areas tend to not get struck by tornadoes. The reason is that the geographic size of suburban areas is small. In the tornado alley, tornadoes frequently hit wide, open land.

The trouble of tracking tornados.

Up until the mid-1990s, there was no tornado tracking system- it was all based on eyewitness reports. That means that if there were a tornado whirling around in the middle of nowhere during that time, and no one saw it, it would vanish from our history books. That’s why scientists established the Doppler Radar Network to keep track of tornadoes. But even with advanced tools like that, we can’t rewind time and analyze the tornado trends of yesteryear. Therefore making it difficult to analyze long-term twirly trends.

This data shows an increase in tornadoes in Kansas., however it can be deceptive, because before the 1990s, there was no Doppler Radar Network to track tornadoes.

Tornado’s location changes.

In the widely known Tornado Alley, tornadoes have been decreasing in frequency, while simultaneously tornadoes have been on the rise in more eastern states such as Alabama, Illinois, and Kentucky. The cause behind this is largely speculative, some think that it may be connected to the effect of climate change on the jet stream. Climate change will likely have an effect on tornadoes, but that effect is still unknown.