Tornadoes Are Coming in Bunches. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why. The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing. ( www.nytimes.com )
While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet’s rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes’ clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.
“The link between climate change and tornadoes is still pretty tenuous,” Dr. Fricker said. “It’s a really open and difficult question for us.” One difficulty is that tornadoes are too small on a planetary scale, and too ephemeral, to show up in the global mathematical models that scientists use to study climate change.
