More Storms and Fewer Scientists
More may not be quite the word. Speaking generally, we're seeing more destructive storms over more populous locations–not necessarily more storms in a numerical sense. While it's difficult to measure climate change's impact on short-lived and "small" phenomenon like tornadoes, it's less difficult to measure the storms and weather patterns that create them. Stronger and more tornadic storms are moving east from the traditional location of Tornado Alley, which formerly resided over the relatively-sparsely-populated Midwest (arguably the Midwest but that's a fight for a different day/newsletter.).
This week, I want to talk about these storms–their increasing frequency, increasing strength, and new target area. We also need to talk about cuts the Trump administration has made to NOAA (reversed but damage done) and other science-driven departments that threaten our ability to forecast the very storms that are an increasing threat. Advances in forecasting over the last century have saved countless lives, and we're going to wind up undoing that in order to save a few bucks and put them in the pocket of billionaires.
The Storms
You probably know that the mechanism by which we get storms is the collision of differing types of air. This can happen at any time, these days, as you've undoubtedly been somewhere that has seen heavy thunderstorms when typically we never would; February has become my least favorite month, as it is both Ohio's most brutally cold and also susceptible to weird warm periods that spawn surprise tornadoes.
When we're talking about Tornado Alley, and our standard tornado season, we're talking about what was formerly a consistent and powerful mix of hot, wet, Gulf air* from the southeast meeting cool, dry air from the northwest–meeting over the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri. Arkansas might be in there too? Not exactly the Midwest, definitely not entirely not. This mixture of wildly different types of air creates what's called in the business "atmospheric instability," which is an unstable mixture of air that encourages a powerful upward draft of warm air, which fosters the creation of storms, which fosters the creation of tornadoes.
Up until recently, Tornado Alley was a largely agreed upon region–though not exactly scientifically defined. In recent decades, though, the location of this corridor of common tornado formation has shifted to the southeast–and according to some, is widening, rather than simply moving. This shifting/broadening of Tornado Alley into Tornado Highway is bad for two reasons: it puts more populous regions at risk; and it puts a less-prepared population at risk. Folks in Kansas have basements and storm cellars and know what to expect. Folks in Alabama? Maybe not so much**.
And it's not just that where the storms are hitting is changing. It's when, how often, and how many. That last article in particular is very informative. It says, at the end, that we are overall seeing fewer days with tornadoes–but when we do have tornado days, we have more tornadoes at once. This is borne out in the super-outbreaks of the last couple years, in which a single storm system spawns tornadoes across multiple states. This brings us to the next part of our problem.
*This is perhaps the main way climate change is influencing this particular weather pattern, as the Gulf heats up (and the oceans heat up generally) more moisture and more heat is brought into the equation, which creates more and more powerful storms, and heavier precipitation.
*Though Alabama, rather famously in my mind, has been hammered for a decade or more by powerful tornadoes. See Tuscaloosa Runs This.
The Scientists
Though our storms are worse, historically they were much more lethal in the last century than today. This is entirely thanks to advances in forecasting. The time that good forecasting buys people in the paths of these storms gives them the chance to get out of the way, or take shelter at least. It's this time that matters. And when it comes to tornadoes, the window of forecasting and action is very small–sometimes just minutes. A delay in warning, or a lack thereof entirely, can mean lives.
Earlier this spring–a little too early to be normal–we saw a cross-country offensive. A storm system started on the west coast on March 13th, (with a tornado even forming in Los Angeles), and then swept eastward across the country. From the 13th to the 16th, this system spawned a March record of 117 tornadoes, took the lives of 43 people, and wrought damages of over $5 billion. While it can hardly be said that we have a tornado season anymore–rather it, like all kinds of natural disaster, can occur year-round–as we entered the season proper, the agencies that help to keep us safe were getting their funding slashed.
The above link is pretty damning, but tells a lucky story: as that storm struck, the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky–which had been closing at night since the budget cuts hit–kept its staff on OT in order to keep an eye on things. It's not a scenario that can necessarily be counted on, as it strained the budget and staff and we're, as we all know, more likely to face more severe weather, not less, in the coming days, weeks, years. Some of the offices that have been hit by these cuts are seeing staff working extremely long hours in order to keep up with the necessary workings of their station, and there will come a point at which they're not able to do so.
Cuts extend, of course, to NOAA as well, which provides us with so much data on weather, forecasting, and climate change. One might guess, correctly I think, that the federal government is bent not just on finding budget cuts and scrubbing science from the agenda–but on making its populace more vulnerable in general. The notion that the ultra-rich are making plans to survive this completely avoidable apocalypse that's coming are, I think, on point, and they're doing so by extracting the last bit of value they can from the planet, and from us.
Brass Tacks
There's a not-so-distant future here in which we pay a subscription service for weather alerts. This has been in the offing since Trump's last term; Accuweather has already made the case for privatizing weather services and have lobbied for the very same. And it's not at all unlikely that, since forecasting is so sophisticated these days, people live and die with the warnings these services are able to provide privately that the government should be doing for us. In the interim, we all have to simply hope that we don't catch a storm on a day that our local office has reached the point of burnout.
This letter was written several weeks ago and postponed due to, you know, various pressing things that were and are on fire. But we've got a very salient and tragic example as to why this is also quite pressing. Last week, a storm system hovered over a swath of Texas** and poured a truly tremendous amount of rain on the region–nearly two trillion gallons–and flash flooding caused, as of this writing, 90 deaths. The Guadalupe River rose some 30-odd feet in less than an hour. While there were vacancies at the Weather Service offices in question, a union rep has stated that staffing was adequate and warnings issued in a timely manner. It appears that this warning, however, was not sufficient, and it's not clear that staffing cuts had no effect on the impacts of this storm. If that's not true in this instance, it will certainly prove true in time.
**The manner of this hovering, and the dramatic amount of rainfall, is predicted by climate change–the study of which is all but ended under the Trump administration.