How 2024 became such an exceptional year for tornadoes
Category: News & Politics
Via: perrie-halpern • 3 weeks ago • 35 commentsBy: Denise Chow and Kathryn Prociv
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Dec. 28, 2024, 10:30 PM UTCBy Denise Chow and Kathryn Prociv
In a year full of extreme weather, experts say 2024's spate of tornado outbreaks, in particular, set it apart.
From January through November (the latest month for which official counts are available), the U.S. recorded 1,762 tornadoes — the highest number in a decade,according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The twisters tended to be strong and destructive, the records show, especially the unusually powerful tornadoes that spawned from Hurricane Milton in October.
"It was kind of like death by 1,000 paper cuts," said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University. "We didn't have an unprecedented number of violent tornadoes, and there wasn't a month with absolutely stellar activity — outbreak after outbreak after outbreak — but when you start aggregating them all together, what you get is a pretty significant year for severe weather."
Tornado outbreaks were among the nation's costliest weather and climate disasters this year. As of Nov. 1, NOAA had tallied a total of 24 weather disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage. Of those events, six were tornado outbreaks, including a cluster of storms over three days in July that produced more than 79 tornadoes across Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New York. An outbreak that hit Iowa in May also made the list — it spawned a devastating tornado that killed five people and cut a 44-mile path across the southeastern part of the state.
The flurry of tornado activity adds to an already sizable and growing set of concerns about the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather. But unlike events like heat waves or wildfires, which have clear links to rising temperatures, researchers are still working to understand why this was such an exceptional tornado year, including possible connections to climate change.
Tornadoes are classified according to what's known as the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale. The weakest tornadoes, or EF-0 and EF-1, have winds of up to 110 mph and typically cause relatively light damage. The most powerful, or EF-5, have winds above 200 mph and usually cause catastrophic damage.
The tornado that flattened a swath of Iowa in May was an EF-4 tornado, and one of the deadliest of 2024. It tore through the town of Greenfield, tossing cars and ripping homes from their foundations. The twister was just one of more than a dozen that cut through the state that day. As a whole, the cluster of storms caused $4.9 billion in damage, according to NOAA.
This year, at least 52 people were killed in tornado outbreaks through November, according to preliminary figures from NOAA. While significant, the number pales in comparison to some of the country's worst tornado years, when hundreds of people died. The single deadliest tornado in U.S. history was an EF-5 twister that killed 695 people in 1925.
The country was lucky to escape a high death toll in 2024, said Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory.
"There have been 27 killer tornadoes so far this year, and the most deaths out of a single event has been seven," Brooks said. "It's a little unusual to have that many killer tornadoes and not have any of them be a really big event."
Still, the tornadoes that touched down caused extensive damage across some central and Southern states.
The July outbreak of more than 79 tornadoes caused $2.4 billion in damage. And a tornado outbreak in late May — separate from the one in Iowa — produced more than 110 tornadoes, including an EF-3 in Texas, causing a total of $3.4 billion in damage. In such cases, most of the damage is from winds that can be powerful enough to level buildings, warp utility poles and hurl debris far afield.
Several tornado events this year also surprised experts. One came just a couple of weeks ago, when a rare tornado touched down north of Santa Cruz, California. The twister injured five people; it was later classified as an EF-1 with peak winds of 90 mph. The storm prompted the National Weather Service to issue its first-ever tornado warning for San Francisco.
Another surprise was 2024's considerable uptick in the occurrence of strong tropical tornadoes — tornadoes produced in hurricanes. Hurricane Milton, which pummeled western Florida when it made landfall on Oct. 9, produced dozens of destructive tornadoes across the state as the storm neared land.
Tornadoes are not altogether uncommon during hurricanes, but they are typically weaker than the ones observed in connection to Milton. Of all recorded tornadoes produced by tropical systems that have made landfall in the U.S., less than 1% have been EF-3 or stronger. This year, four of the five hurricanes that made landfall in the U.S. produced tornadoes of EF-3 intensity.
"Milton will likely go down as the most prolific tornado-producing hurricane in history," Gensini said. "Those tornadoes rivaled what you would see in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska or the Great Plains. It's highly unusual to see tornadoes of that strength and frequency with hurricanes."
It's not clear why Hurricane Milton churned out so many twisters, but a study published in June found that the number of tornadic storms could increase by as much as 299% by midcentury if fossil fuel emissions continue at their current pace.
However, scientists do not yet have a solid understanding of what influence, if any, climate change has on tornadoes overall. Thus far, research indicates that global warming can increase atmospheric instability, a key ingredient in the development of thunderstorms. Instability in the atmosphere often comes from differences in temperature and air density, which in turn fuels strong columns of rotating air within storms.
But many aspects of tornado science are still murky, including what causes some tornadoes to intensify while others break apart. Some studies have even found that climate change might suppress the formation of tornadoes by weakening vertical wind shear, a term that refers to the waywinds increase and change direction at different atmospheric heights. Reduced wind shear could limit the amount of warm, rising air, making it less likely for storms to spawn tornadoes.
Given those lingering unknowns, teasing out any direct links between climate change and specific tornado outbreaks remains tricky.
"We do understand that greater instability and warmer temperatures should promote larger hail, more tornadoes and that sort of thing," Gensini said. "But for any individual tornado, it's very hard to make those assessments at this time."
With several days left until the year ends, tornado outbreaks are still possible.
"This last quarter has been pretty quiet for tornadoes, but it's not unheard of to have tornadoes — and perhaps even strong ones — in late December, in the cool season," Gensini said.
Indeed, more twisters may be on the horizon: Severe storms and tornadoes are possible across parts of the South and Gulf Coast over the weekend, and NOAA's counts for the year do not yet include tornadoes that were reported Thursday in Louisiana.
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That more tornados were observed doesn't necessarily mean that more tornados occurred overall.
Lots of storm chasers and ordinary folks taking pictures these days might account for some of the alleged increase.
The writers clearly have no understanding of atmospheric physics.
And you do? From your commentary, it wouldn't appear so. When a tornado is reported they send people to verify that there was in fact a tornado, then they add the tornados to the tally.
What's your source for this? Who is "they"? Who do they send out, and where and when?
[deleted]
[✘] Or perhaps technology and science have enabled our meteorologists to better track and document tornadic activity
"They" are the National Weather Service (NWS):
I'm surprised we don't have more tornadoes in colorado, since we're surrounded by states that suck and blow ...
And you clearly are a compulsive denier of anthropogenic global climate change. Even most far right wing denier groups (Heartland & Heritage) can't deny anymore. Only amateurs still do.
The misconception about climate change is that man is causing it, therefore man can fix it. The next ice age will happen no matter what man does, the sea level rise, ice sheet and glacier melts, the continued warming can't be stopped because man isn't the cause of it.
Climate activists have based their science on assumptions and the one main assumption came with the discovery that the planet went through ice ages and that was that the climate had to become colder for there to be ice ages and Milankovitch came up with orbital and tilt cycles to explain the ice ages of the northern hemisphere only, not knowing all the facts yet. The southern hemisphere goes through an ice age at the same time which is impossible because the cycles, while cooling the northern hemisphere, warm the southern hemisphere. He didn't know of the sea level rises before an ice age which were all higher than they are now. They have core drilled the Antarctic ice sheet to 800,000 years ago at a total depth of 2-1/2 miles, during this 800,000 year time span the planet has gone through seven ice ages piling ice depths of up to and more than 1 mile thick each time, that's a totally different dynamic than "It's colder".
And, BTW, another assumption is that CO2 is a green house gas, well if this were so, then why did Venus cool with the development of the CO2 layer?
Prove it.
What leads you to believe that Venus has cooled? Its current surface temperature is 475°C and that is fundamentally a result of its CO₂ based atmosphere. By "cooling" are you referring to the difference between the current temperature and the highs (spikes) likely reached prior to reaching thermo equilibrium?
Venus is currently about 900 F at the surface and the assumption is it has never been hotter, except for one little item, the surface of Venus has been wiped clean of most all structure leading some scientists to assume that Venus had a planet wide volcanic cycle that covered the entire surface with molten lava, this type of event would be extremely unlikely, meaning the surface was somewhere over 2500-3000 F and that the volcanism is what created the CO2 layer, but even with that 30 km thick layer of CO2 the planet still cooled.
My belief of how Venus is what it is today is it was a water planet much like Earth and it even had a moon which stabilized it, but it lost it's moon and one pole tidal locked with the sun. Being a water planet it had built up copious amounts of calcium carbonate just like Earth and many sulphates, as the pole heated the water evaporated the atmosphere density increased causing a planet wide heating until all water evaporated, the temperature increased to the point the sulphates broke down and sulfur dioxide mixed with the water vapor creating sulfuric acid, the chemical reaction increased the temperature to the point that the surface turned molten which caused a sublimation of the calcium carbonate releasing the CO2 and as the CO2 layer thickened it pushed the actual greenhouse gases higher into the atmosphere where they became less dense and the planet cooled.
If you wish to know why Venus rotates backwards, there is a simple explanation and in a way we could share the partial blame.
Which part do I need to prove?
Bottom line, we do not know that Venus was hotter but we suspect it was. Your contention is that Venus cooled from its high (prior to reaching thermal equilibrium) in spite of the CO₂ atmosphere and thus, you conclude, the CO₂ atmosphere is not to blame for the extant temperature of Venus.
For our purposes, it does not matter if a highly CO₂ rich atmosphere can trap enough heat to raise the surface temperature beyond that which will kill all life. We care only about CO₂ levels that would make our planet uninhabitable.
To that end, global warming based on the greenhouse effect is a real concern.
I would say that you need to prove the findings of worldwide scientific initiatives such as the IPCC are wrong:
Global warming isn't because of the "greenhouse effect" it's due to the water cycle effect. As the water accumulates in the seas, as they have been doing since the last ice age, the temperature will rise as will the sea levels and CO2 levels and the glaciers and ice sheets will continue to melt adding to all of that. There will be a point, though, that this will reverse with the warmer seas transporting warm water into the colder latitudes causing the lift and precipitation to start accumulating and freezing in during the winters to start forming ice sheets that the summers can no longer fully melt both from their expanse and the albedo effect. The water cycle is a concern because we will lose the 51st state to the ice sheets of the next ice age, but our purchase of Greenland will compensate some of the land area lost including Florida, the coast lines, and the lower Mississippi valley area.
NASA's own ice cores of Antarctica show the CO2 level rises before every ice age, but also, does it concern you just a little bit that these ice cores are from a 2-1/2 mile thick ice sheet that is 800,000 years old in which that same time period the earth experienced seven ice ages producing ice sheets one mile thick plus, but interestingly, not at the south pole and they happen at 100,000 year intervals. We are now approaching the beginning of the next 100,000 year cycle.
The IPCC is still assuming that it is CO2 that is causing warming and any additional man made rise will cause sea level rises because of ice melt, since its man's fault therefore man can fix it. Man cannot stop the next ice age from occurring. The planet will not become uninhabitable just parts of the colder latitudes will.
we do not know that Venus was hotter but we suspect it was.
If their observation is correct that the Venusian surface was once molten, then yeah it was hotter and it was the heat that produced the CO2 layer.
Repeating your causation hypothesis does not explain how the world’s climate scientists can be wrong and you be right.
I could describe plenty of scenarios where I pick different root causes and then merely claim that I am correct. I doubt that a learned climate scientist would be impressed by my hypotheses.
how the world’s climate scientists can be wrong and you be right.
I know, that has been thrown at me quite a bit. A couple have posted memes like the "Honey look" and the only one in a crowd of scientists making this claim, the thing is both those memes describe my position. I don't see it anywhere else or anyone else that noticed where we are in the ice age cycle. NASA's ice core records made me realize that CO2 isn't the problem, it's actually the sea level rise that is promoting the sea level rise and warming. The other thing is most if not all climate scientists have embraced the Milankovitch Cycles as gospel. Milankovitch was wrong, when he and other scientists at the time learned earth went through ice ages they assumed the climate had to be colder to produce an ice age.
There was an article posted, I believe last spring, about mammoth fossils and DNA found in the sediments of Greenland which proves Greenland was habitable to mammoths at some point, therefore no ice sheet, animals only travel where they know there is food and water, they never trod the ice sheets that would've been certain death.
Perhaps it's time for some introspective?
We are in an interglacial period. This isn't news to climate science considering this cycle started 2.6 million years ago.
That makes no logical sense.
Not true. Current climate science has shows that Milankovitch cycles contribute, but do not fully account for the current rapid warming trend primarily attributed to human activities.
So what I posted is true, climate science is using Milankovitch's work to claim it should be colder right now and a human induced warming trend is keeping the cycle from doing it's thing. This then does mean that scientists assume that an ice age can only start when the climate cools.
That makes no logical sense.
The Thwaites Glacier is nearing collapse due to sea level rise, Greenland's glaciers are accelerating from decreased back pressure from sea level rise, and Greenland is increasingly surrounded by more warm water causing the melting of the ice sheet from sea level rise, so yes it does make logical sense. As the sea level rises, beginning from the last ice age, the warmer waters have been increasingly invading the colder latitudes causing melting and a sea level rise.
As I noted, your being convinced of sea level rise being the explanation for global warming does not carry much weight. It is striking that you seem to ignore the overwhelming evidence that our warming is predominantly due to the greenhouse effect and that the world's scientists (barring a very tiny fraction) agree on this.
Have you published your hypothesis? Has it been peer reviewed? It would be very interesting to read what climate scientists might offer given such a paper.
What you posted was partially true and in a way that leads me to believe you didn't understand the actual issue or the science behind it. You point to symptoms yet have not explained the cause of the rapid acceleration of change.
I have been publishing it right here. I take it your peer review would be a no, that's fine, no problem.
I have history on my side, much of Florida will become submerged as well as everything else I stated in 1.2.8 as has happened prior to every ice age. To continue the melt of the ice sheets of Greenland it will get warmer, because the conditions still haven't been met to start the next ice age. Scientists are still using words like may, might, could, possibly, etc., I, however, am using will.
You'll need to clarify what was partially true.
Okay, I think you know very well what I meant.
Given you have not subjected your hypothesis to peer scientific review and you are contradicting substantial learned climate science theory that has indeed been subjected to (and endured) critical review by scientists in the field, I am not persuaded to accept your explanation over theirs.
Using more definitive language does not mean your conclusions are more correct.
You cherry pick parts and pieces of what climate science talks about, gaslight us about how climate science has never considered them, and then misapply logic to fit your theory.
Let's start with Milankovitch. When scientists first learned that earth went through "ice" ages the word ice meant cold so the assumption was made that the climate gets colder to produce an ice age and with that information Milankovitch produced his theory and all others, who assumed the same thing, colder, agreed. Since then we have learned sea levels were higher, Greenland has lost it's ice sheets before (hence the higher sea levels), the earth has a thermosphere that negates some of the solar inputs, the southern hemisphere had an ice age at the same time the northern hemisphere did (this point doesn't seem to get any consideration from climate science, Milankovitch cycles were meant to explain the northern hemisphere ice ages, using his cycles whatever cools the northern warms the southern, so why the southern ice age at the same time?), and that we are now experiencing warmer temperatures that the earth hasn't seen in 100,000 years or just prior to the last ice age. The only thing that explains the northern and southern ice ages happening at the same time is that the sea levels are higher in both at the same time.
History supports my theory not some ancient scientist.
A well know scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, produced a video explaining sea level rise, he started out (this is a paraphrasing BTW) at the last ice age when the sea levels were at their lowest because the water was locked up on land as ice. The ice started melting and returning to the seas raising the sea levels with warmer water warming the climate and melting the on land ice further increasing the sea levels, (I'm with him saying keep going Neil you're almost there) until we have now achieved the sea levels of a stable climate. Now I'm saying whoa, wait, what the. He then changed it from sea level causing the warming to, since we are at a stable sea level any rises from here on out is because of man and CO2. This is what peer review has produced, it has to be man's doing otherwise, frankly, there is no money in it.
If I produced this hypothesis to be peer scientific reviewed, do you think it would get anywhere when the science blames CO2 and man when I claiming the sea levels are to blame leaving man and CO2 blameless.
First off, you have an hypothesis, not a theory.
Second, it is a bit futile to challenge all of climate science as one lone uncited poster on a social media forum who cannot even deliver peer reviews on his published hypothesis in a credible scientific venue.
Finally Milankovitch cycles are only part of the explanation for the cause of ice ages. In addition to the astronomical factors (Milankovitch), we have atmospheric (greenhouse gases), geological (tectonics and volcanic activity), and oceanic processes (thermohaline circulation, ice reflection).
There are quite a few factors considered by modern climate science. They do not, as you suggest, merely assume that Milankovitch cycles are the full explanation.
see @1.2.21
Sure it's as good as any other place to start.
Your oversimplifying and misrepresenting it yet again. The data tells us the earth has gone through various climate cycles. Milankovitch built on Keppler's work and applied axial tilt, axial precession, apsidal precession and orbital inclination to explain how those climate cycles happened.
I have never heard anyone (except you) apply Milankovitch cycles only to the northern hemisphere. Considering astronomers are applying the theory to what we know of mars and possible exoplanets it seems bit ridiculous.
Saying it's a Milankovitch Cycles without saying it's a Milankovitch Cycle... seems rather weird and again tortures logic.
History actually does the opposite. In no time in pre human history have we seen such rapid change... You fail to take the direct correlation in the rise in fossil fuel use to the rise sea water temps in your rush to discard current climate science.
To vastly oversimplify the issue - climate science starts with the Milankovitch cycle and then drops the greenhouse effect on top of it. Current climate science pours over mountains of data points from all over the globe from numerous fields of study and constantly adjusts its finding.
So 8 billion people have NO impact on the environment at all? Are you fucking serious? LOL
First off, I agree that we can do little to nothing as humans to prevent the next ice age. That is not of immediate concern.
We are fairly certain that the correlation between fossil fuels/concrete production etc and the warming climate is causal, not merely coincidental. As such, if the powers that be truly cared, they would long ago have instituted a course of action to have us, if not reverse, then at least slow the rate of global warming. I think that we have disrupted the slow-carbon-cycle and transposed enough carbon into the fast-carbon-cycle to make this pretty much a moot point. It would help if our public and politicians would admit that there is a difference between normal, cyclic change and abnormal change. To simply say that ' We can do nothing ' ignores the evidence that this particular change was at the very least hastened by human activity. It ignores the fact that a great amount of carbon that took an extremely long time to be placed in rock was removed from sequestration in a relative instant.
You have not shown that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. You have given 1 instance of supposed alternate outcomes with really no evidence to back up your claim, ie: evidence that Venus has indeed cooled while at the same time developing an atmosphere of CO2.
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Further, in 1.2.4 you make several claims about Venus' topography and surface conditions. These are a good place to start for anyone interested in Venus. I intend no disrespect by offering these up.
Huh?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and humans produce a LOT of it. We have known this for decades.
I know I'm late to this conversation, but are you sure Tyson said that ice cold glacial meltwater raised the sea levels with warmer water? That doesn't make sense. Adding a bunch of very cold glacial runoff to the oceans should lower the overall heat budget, globally speaking, considering that a great deal of the oceans are in warm equatorial and tropical zones (much warmer than glacial runoff). Adding cold water to warm water doesn't make the warm water warmer.
Also, somewhere above you seem to say that CO2 is not in fact a greenhouse gas. What are you basing that on? That's something that can be demonstrated rather easily in labs. The CO2 molecule (among others) is resonant with thermal radiation at a few specific frequencies. That's how it increases in energy when under heating conditions, and when those conditions change (like at night) it releases that energy back into the environment in all directions, over and over again, producing a local insulating effect.
In your water cycle hypothesis, what allows new heat purportedly delivered by rising seas to accumulate and stick around long enough to create any additional warming of the surface environment? Without greenhouse gasses like CO2, the heat would just radiate away into space at the speed of light, as if there were no atmosphere at all.
Overpopulation is the driving cause of this and other problems