Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast: Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be. In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of
Fantastic presentation! Thank you for sharing this. Catastrophic hailstorms are also on the increase, and changing, and I wonder how that overlaps with the tornado story? Are they linked?
Hail trends have varied quite a bit across the contiguous US. A recent paper:
et al: "Owing to a dearth of long-term observations, as well as incomplete process understanding and limited convection-permitting modelling studies, current and future climate change effects on hailstorms remain highly uncertain." https://nature.com/articles/s43017-020-00133-9
Thanks Andy. It would be interesting to explore if the average hail size is increasing and what the eventual impacts would be of such a catastrophic trend. Here's a link to the story of an 8 inch hail stone found in South Dakota in 2010. https://www.weather.gov/abr/vivianhailstone.
An even larger hail stone was found in northern Bangladesh after the storm killed 92 people, and Wiki says a hailstorm helped lead to the French Revolution. Crazy stuff! And I wonder if anyone is examining how global warming will affect this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_costly_or_deadly_hailstorms.
Fantastic presentation! Thank you for sharing this. Catastrophic hailstorms are also on the increase, and changing, and I wonder how that overlaps with the tornado story? Are they linked?
Hail trends have varied quite a bit across the contiguous US. A recent paper:
et al: "Owing to a dearth of long-term observations, as well as incomplete process understanding and limited convection-permitting modelling studies, current and future climate change effects on hailstorms remain highly uncertain." https://nature.com/articles/s43017-020-00133-9
Thanks Andy. It would be interesting to explore if the average hail size is increasing and what the eventual impacts would be of such a catastrophic trend. Here's a link to the story of an 8 inch hail stone found in South Dakota in 2010. https://www.weather.gov/abr/vivianhailstone.
An even larger hail stone was found in northern Bangladesh after the storm killed 92 people, and Wiki says a hailstorm helped lead to the French Revolution. Crazy stuff! And I wonder if anyone is examining how global warming will affect this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_costly_or_deadly_hailstorms.