The tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo. was the single deadliest tornado in the U.S. since the 1950s--one of a spate of unusually strong cyclones this year.
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The tornado that plowed a wide swath of death and destruction through Joplin, Mo., on Sunday unleashed winds of up to 198 miles per hour, federal forecasters said yesterday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's preliminary analysis ranks the twister as an F4, the second-highest rating on the five-point scale used to classify tornadoes.
Agency officials said the Joplin storm, at times three-quarters of a mile wide, was the deadliest single tornado to hit the United States since 1953. At least 116 people died and 500 were injured by the storm. The numbers are expected to climb as aid workers comb through the wreckage left behind.
"This is the ninth-deadliest tornado year on record so far," said Jack Hayes, director of NOAA's National Weather Service. "More than 450 people have been killed. ... With so many fatalities this year, I think we have to ask ourselves the tough questions now. Why is this happening?"
But experts said there is no easy explanation for the ferocious intensity of this year's tornado season.
"Certainly, I think you could say we have a high-impact season," Hayes said. "I think we have more F4s and F5s than in past years -- but for us to say this is climate change, I don't know that we have the evidence that we can say that definitively."
Unusually warm surface water in the Gulf of Mexico -- about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal -- may be a factor, he said.
A 'remarkable pattern' shifts killer storms eastward
"When you have a long, prolonged stretch of warm humid air coming in from the Gulf of Mexico, you are going to set up conditions that are ripe," Hayes said. "And then, when you have these slow-moving fronts and an injection of cooler air, it collides and triggers this instability."
That collision between very warm, humid air at low levels of the atmosphere and cool air at higher levels creates the upward vertical winds within a thunderstorm that sometimes turn into a tornado, said Thomas Schwein, deputy director of the National Weather Service's Central Region, which includes Missouri.
This year, the jet stream has been dipping farther south than normal, allowing it ready access to that warm Gulf of Mexico air. "It's been a remarkable pattern from a day-to-day weather perspective," Schwein said. That has also shifted this year's tornadoes farther to the east, into more densely populated sections of the country, which may account in part for the high number of fatalities.
Another expert suggested a potential influence from the current La Niña weather pattern, in place since last summer.
"We have been coming out of a La Niña," said Russell Schneider, director of NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. "There is some emerging research that links more active severe-weather seasons -- particularly months like April -- to emerging within a La Niña." Such a pattern was observed in 1965 and 1974, which Schneider called "major springtime severe-weather outbreak years."
NOAA's storm survey crews hope to issue a final storm strength rating today for the Joplin tornado. The agency sent additional crews to Missouri yesterday to examine the pattern of destruction left by the twister, observations NOAA scientists will use to estimate the tornado's power.
Some insurers see climate connection to rising risks
Sunday's tornado also thrusts the insurance industry toward a potential record-breaking year for thunderstorm-related damage. Inland storm claims over the last three years have risen to about $30 billion altogether. That accounts for almost one-third of all the thunderstorm damage going back to 1990, amounting to $97.8 billion, according to the Insurance Information Institute. This year will add billions more onto that tally.
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1 Comments
Add CommentThe consequences of global warming are perhaps foreshadowed by this event, although I am sure that we will continue to deny any connection between increasing storms and the fact that we are pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Scientific American will continue to be a cheerleader for the technoscience fix rather than for energy conservation.
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