Curious About Severity Of Tornado Season
BOSTON (CBS) -- It has been an extremely deadly, dangerous and record breaking tornado season. Tornado Alley is certainly living up to its name. So far, 481 people have died in tornadoes just this year.
Debby from Lynn Declared her Curiosity and asked, "Why have they been so large and dangerous this year? And don't we have too many in New England?"
The high death toll is partly because these huge tornadoes have been rolling over major population centers like Tuscaloosa, Birmingham and Joplin, Missouri.
The storms are being fueled by extreme warm and cold in the pattern. Some of the warmest sea surface temperatures we have seen this early in the season are in the Gulf of Mexico. This supplies warm moist air into the southern states. Cool dry air from the west clashes into this unstable air to trigger storms.
WBZ Meteorologist Joe Joyce reports.
The X-factor this year, has been the enhanced cool air from La Nina in the Pacific. This has made the jet stream have very strong winds known as wind shear which helps put a twist to the rising air as it is lifted up into a thunderstorm.
As winds change speed with direction and height, a spinning horizontal column of air develops near the ground. As air rapidly rises into a thunderstorm, these updrafts push this spinning column of air into the vertical.
The end result is a tornado, a violent spinning column of rising air extending from the ground into a thunderstorm. Most tornadoes are weak, but as we have seen this spring, when conditions are right, tornadoes can become monstrous in size and produce catastrophic damage very quickly with little warning or place to hide.
Our saving grace from tornadoes in New England is our proximity to the cool waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The cool air tends to suppress thunderstorm development. But as we learned in June 1953, as the warmth and humidity builds in summer our risk increases for the potential of severe weather and tornadoes.
