The last couple days has seen a multitude of tornadoes cutting swaths across what’s known as Tornado Alley.
Those tornadoes have added to one of the most deadly tornado seasons on record. Over 1,000 tornadoes and around 500 people killed so far. It’s stunning and tragic.
And though people are undoubtedly searching for reasons behind this year’s torrent of storms, they’ll likely have to keep looking.
Tornadoes are the most violent storms, sometimes generating winds as strong as 300 miles per hour. While most of them are relatively weak (up to 70-mph winds), some are deadly violent, obviously.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tornadoes occur all over the globe but most frequently in the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains during spring and summer. Tornado Alley is the area between the Rockies and the Appalachians.
Tornadoes are rotating columns of air touching both the ground and either a cumulonimbus or cumulus cloud. They form when warm, moist air meets a cold front.
Tornadoes can be small twisters that damage signs but not much else, or they can be monstrous cyclones that leave destruction in a wake a mile or more wide and 50 miles long. Reports from Monday’s storms estimated tornadoes may have reached as high as the flight paths of commercial airliners.
Tornadoes are difficult for scientists to get a handle on because they’re so unpredictable and trends are hard to identify, according to the Washington Post’s Andrew Freedman.
Environmentally speaking, tornadoes can destroy natural wildlife habitat and, obviously, affect the weather. But they can also destroy nuclear power plants and chemical weapons depots just as easily, creating environmental emergencies.
As far as looking for environmental causes of their increased numbers, however, we’re still in the dark. According to Freedman, global warming may be causing weather changes that create more tornadoes, but we’ve found no evidence of that yet.
