The Tornadoes Continue
Update: There are have been dozens of tornadoes or vortex signatures showing on the map tonight in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. Another terrible day in the middle of the country.
They weren’t as bad as Sunday, but there were tornadoes that touched down in Ohio and Indiana yesterday. I track them using the Weather Underground’s Tornado Map on my right sidebar.
Dr Masters provides a wrap up on the Joplin tornado:
Severe weather is expected again today in storm-torn Joplin, Missouri, as rescuers sift through the rubble of their town that was devastated by the deadliest U.S. tornado since at least 1947. A violent high-end EF-4 tornado with winds of 190 – 198 mph carved a 7-mile long, ¾ to one mile-wide path of near-total destruction through Joplin beginning at 5:41pm CDT Sunday evening. In nine terrifying minutes, the tornado killed at least 116 people, injured 500 more, and obliterated huge sections of the town. Damage from the tornado is so severe that pavement was ripped from the ground, and the level of damage is so extreme that this is likely to surpass last month’s Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado as the costliest tornado of all-time.
There are two major reasons for these outbreaks this year: the water in the Gulf of Mexico is warmer than normal, and the La Niña has played hell with the jet stream.
When a low pressure system forms in the center of the country, the warm, moist air from the Gulf and the cool, dry Canadian air are pulled towards it. The jet stream provides the “spin” that turns a thunderstorm into a tornado. The greater the temperature differential between the cold and warm air masses, the more powerful the thunderstorm and the more likely it is to rise to the altitude of the jet stream and pick up spin.
2 comments
Hey but the Righties say that global warming doesn’t exist. That all this bad weather is just a historical trend.
Pat Robertson once said that Katrina was God’s punishment for NOLA being tolerant of gays. No word from yet from him on why God was punishing the areas destroyed by the tornadoes.
I guess he’s still praying and trying to figure out a way to blame it on Obama.
Harley, Lake Champlain, that’s up on the New York-Vermont-Canada border just broke a flood record that was set in the Civil War. We are seeing a 500-year flood on the Mississippi. There is a 300-year flood happening in Manitoba, Canada. The Gulf of Mexico is already above 80°.
The entire climate record says that the Earth should be cooling. All of the cycles that have been occurring for thousands of years, say things should be colder than normal. That is obviously not what is happening. Not only is the Earth getting warmer, it’s doing it despite all of the natural cycles trying to make it colder.
I spent a lot of time flying over the Arctic in my insane youth, and I can tell you that you didn’t see open water until late June. Now the ice melts in mid-Spring.
This is what Climate Change is all about – breaking records. We’ve been breaking them almost daily for the past two weeks on the North coast of the Gulf of Mexico. We have wildfires in the Everglades and the Okefenokee swamps because of drought conditions.
We need to clean up our act, and do it before it is too late to do any good. I’m fairly certain that I was supposed to leave the place livable when it is my turn to check out.