Posted on 08/08/2018 11:39:01 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
A tornado, albeit a weak one, touched down in New York City last Thursday, in the College Point neighborhood of Queens. A few days earlier, a stronger tornado was spotted near the town of Douglas, in central Massachusetts.
The storms were far from the region in the middle of the country known as Tornado Alley, where the bulk of the nation’s tornadoes occur. In a summer already marked by simmering heat that researchers have linked to global warming, is climate change also making tornadoes more common in places where they once were infrequent?
Though individual weather events are distinct from the more broadly changing climate, global warming does influence weather patterns. Still, any link between climate change and the frequency of tornadoes is far from straightforward, according to researchers.
Though it’s not possible to quantify to what degree, if any, climate change played a role in the tornadoes in New York and Massachusetts, researchers have some inkling into how climate change will affect tornadoes more broadly.
When scientists run climate models assuming global average temperatures of one degree Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels - where the Earth currently stands - some show an uptick in tornado frequency, but others do not. That disagreement, however, fades away at two degrees Celsius of warming, the threshold that the Paris climate agreement is intended to avoid. All the models agree that the frequency of tornadoes will increase by that point.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Over the last thirty years, NY has averaged ~10 tornadoes a year, most of which have been in the EF0/EF1 category. July is the busiest month. So far this year, NY has had six tornadoes. All but one have been EF0/EF1, and the lone exception was an EF2. Seems pretty normal to me.
Good point. When they dubbed "Sandy" a SUPERSTORM (IMHO, simply because it was bearing down on NYC and NJ), it really rubbed me the wrong way.
I grew up in eastern NC and moved back after college. A tornado that nearly hit our house is literally my earliest memory of childhood.
I have lived through many, many serious hurricanes including Fran, Floyd and most recently, Matthew. None of them were deemed "superstorms" but I can only assume that's because they affected us yokels down here in North Cackalacky.
/rant over
The corrected track of the storm shows its path to be just a few miles north of the bridge. So my mother would have had an astonishing view. Survivors said that the funnel was so big that you could not tell it was a tornado - just debris flying all over the place. Meteorologists figure the winds at max intensity were in excess of 350 mph - a very strong F4.
Not many people are aware of that fact. Since 1990 the rate of weakening has increased with each passing year. So a pole shift is coming. The bad aspect is that as the magnetic poles weaken and shift, our protection from cosmic radiation is greatly decreased, and the intensity and frequency of geologic activity is greatly increased. Also notable is that the Earth’s magnetic field helps hold our atmosphere in place.
I remember that storm.
I was standing in Brookline Village waiting for a bus and knew nothing about the tornado.
Millions of leaves were just hovering in the air over us——one of the strangest thing that I had ever seen—they just stayed there.
When I arrived home and turned on the radio I heard about the tornado.
.
I cannot even imagine the fury of that...a mile wide, 350 mph winds.
Coming over a bridge and seeing that...GET OFF THE BRIDGE!!!!!!!
I know of reported tornadoes in Upstate NY in the 1800s. This ain’t nuthin new.
Springfield MA is still trying to get more federal aid—from the 2011 tornado.
Most of Springfield looks like a tornado hit it yesterday—so it is a great long con. :-)
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