,
8 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Numerous interview requests streaming in re: recent tornadoes and climate change. No, climate change did not cause the recent rash of US tornadoes. Climate change does not cause any given extreme weather event. It does alter background probabilities of the PDF curve. 1/8
Analogy here is baseball during the steroid era. Was that home run due to steroids? Maybe, maybe not. Hard (impossible?) to tell only examining an at-bat. Much easier to tell when examining seasonal home runs and batting averages. 2/8
Here’s what we know. Most of the literature has focused on severe convective storms in the aggregate sense due to the lack of a good descriminator among hazards using regional climate models in CAM configurations. These studies, and others using envs. from GCMs...3/8
suggest that severe weather environments and surrogate severe will increase in the spring and become more variable from year to year. This is not (yet) specific to any specific SCS hazard. There has been other work regarding hail that I will not get into here. 4/8
Especially important to remind everyone that cli change is only one component. We will continue to see more tornado disasters forthcoming as our human footprint continues to increase. Reference the important work from @WalkerSAshley and @StephenMStrader to see for yourself. 5/8
@hebrooks87 and I have shown some interesting spatial trends in activity that could lead to increasing risk for more vulnerable populations. It is not clear if these trends are natural variability or climate change induced trends. 6/8
Finally, the recent period of intense severe weather with virtually no break was anticipated. Our team began discussing this possibility on April 20th, a month before this pattern emerged. 7/8
This speaks volumes to our emerging understanding of subseasonal drivers of severe convective storms, but we have so much more work to do. #needfunding 8/8
