I've kinda thought about taking a skywarn class, if for no other reason than to better read the sky to know if I'm about to head in to trouble like this.
I have been a certified advanced-level SKYWARN severe weather spotter for several years now. Since I am also an amateur (a.k.a. "ham") radio operator, during times of severe weather I participate in "severe weather nets" with other local SKYWARN-trained hams. During a severe weather outbreak, ham radio operators spread-out across their local county to act as spotters and report their position to a net control operator over their two-way radios. In addition to being able to talk to the spotters, the net control operator also has a direct line of communication to both the National Weather Service office in Chicago, and with some of the adjacent counties' net control operators. When any of the ham SKYWARN spotters observe something that should be reported, we radio to net control and call it in using a standardized procedure and format. Our reports will then be forwarded to the National Weather Service. The communication can also go the other way as well-- should the National Weather Service see something suspicious near a storm spotter's position on their WSR-88D Doppler RADAR they can radio to that spotter and ask them what they are seeing at that location. Since my amateur radio license and car-mounted mobile two-way radio gear is considered to be a useful asset by the county, I am encouraged to take the advanced-level training courses offered by my county's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which is the same level of training given to local Police, Fire, EMS, and Emergency Management personnel. I retake the advanced level course every year to refresh and update my training.
If you are interested in getting SKYWARN spotter training for yourself, be sure to check out the section labeled "How Can I Get Involved?" on the National Weather Service's SKYWARN page here:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/skywarn/For those wondering if this year's tornado season thus far really has been that much more severe than in recent years, I have looked up the tornado occurrence statistics provided by the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center for you. For the months of January and February of this year the U.S. had 79 and 53 tornadoes respectively. This is definitely above the three year averages for those months, which are 17 and 33 tornadoes, respectively. I can't give you these same types of statistics for March and April of this year yet since there are only preliminary figures recorded for those months at this point, and the preliminary figures are not very accurate. While January and February were definitely above average for that time of year, if you want to compare those months to the most active months of tornado season, they aren't anything extraordinary. To illustrate what I mean, the 3-year averages for the heart of tornado season, April, May, and June, had 371, 279, and 251 tornadoes respectively. So while this year's tornado season has had an energetic start, it is not like we saw anywhere near late-spring numbers of tornadoes during the beginning of this year or anything like that. Also keep in mind that an above average start to the tornado season doesn't necessarily indicate either way about whether or not the rest of the tornado season is going to be above average.
In addition, Ziel calling 2012 "the year of the tornado" at this point in time shows just how short everyone's memories really are in this day and age of sensationalized media reports. 2011 actually had the month with the most reported tornadoes
of all time, which was
April of 2011 with 758 tornadoes. In comparison, even if you take into account preliminary tornado reports for this entire year so far (which generally run
much higher than the later verified results), we have only had 393 tornadoes for all of 2012, which is only a little more than half as many tornadoes that occurred in that one month last year alone. Also, so far at this point in time we are also way behind last year in reported tornado-caused deaths (not that that is a bad thing by any means). At this point in 2012 we have had 57 people killed by tornadoes, while last year at this point we had 362 tornado caused deaths. So while people may have had some cause to call last year "the year of the tornado," Ziel is really jumping the gun trying to apply that kind of label to 2012 this early into the season. According to recent trends the United States suffers from around 1300 tornadoes a year, so we still have a
long way to go yet before we hit that average.
Luckily, this year has been very quiet for me personally so far and I have not had to do much storm-spotter-wise. Since I usually spot from my house I consider the relatively quiet local weather to be a very good thing, because when I do report severe conditions that means that they are happening near my house. However, with that said, last year for me was pretty wild since an EF1 tornado touched down less than a mile away from where I live. I was outside at the time spotting that storm, and while I never saw the tornado itself (the tornado had no visible convective funnel and it occurred at night), I was still more than busy reporting electrical transformer explosions and tree damage, and calling in estimated flat-line wind speeds. I surveyed the damage that the tornado caused after the storm was over, and it had flattened some fences, wrecked the nearby high school's tennis courts, bent some utility poles, and seriously mangled some trees. While an EF1 is the second-weakest rating that a tornado can be labeled with using the Enhanced-Fujita Scale, and the damage done by it was nowhere near the degree of severity of the damage shown in Buckshot's photos, it was still too close for comfort as far as I was concerned. I used to do a lot of mobile spotting from my car in past years, but in my area there are lots of car traffic, hills, buildings, and trees and as a result it is just not safe to do mobile spotting without having a partner riding along in the car with me. Because of that I gave up on spotting from my car, and as I mentioned above now I just generally spot from my house or wherever I happen to be when severe weather strikes.
But seriously, maybe there's some major climate change affecting these tornadoes. I wish anyone in these areas the best. All we can do is hope.
As far as climate change effecting tornado formation goes, to quote the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center's
Online Tornado Frequently Asked Questions page:
Does "global warming" cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, "Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?" The best answer is: We don't know. According to the National Science and Technology Council's Scientific Assessment on Climate Change, "Trends in other extreme weather events that occur at small spatial scales--such as tornadoes, hail, lightning, and dust storms--cannot be determined at the present time due to insufficient evidence." This is because tornadoes are short-fused weather, on the time scale of seconds and minutes, and a space scale of fractions of a mile across. In contrast, climate trends take many years, decades, or millennia, spanning vast areas of the globe. The numerous unknowns dwell in the vast gap between those time and space scales. Climate models cannot resolve tornadoes or individual thunderstorms. They can indicate broad-scale shifts in three of the four favorable ingredients for severe thunderstorms (moisture, instability and wind shear), but as any severe weather forecaster can attest, having some favorable factors in place doesn't guarantee tornadoes. Our physical understanding indicates mixed signals--some ingredients may increase (instability), while others may decrease (shear), in a warmer world. The other key ingredient (storm-scale lift), and to varying extents moisture, instability and shear, depend mostly on day-to-day patterns, and often, even minute-to-minute local weather. Finally, tornado record keeping itself also has been prone to many errors and uncertainties, doesn't exist for most of the world, and even in the U. S., only covers several decades in detailed form.
You know there have always been a lot of tornadoes here. This isn't something new. The only difference is that we have been building new towns like crazy. So now there are a lot more places, and a greater chance, for a tornado to hit.
This statement of Furryglowstick's is actually very true, and the lecturers at my SKYWARN training seminar remind us of this fact every year as it is a real nightmare from an Emergency Management perspective. They do this by showing us the damage caused to the then small town of Plainfield, Illinois when it was directly hit and leveled by an EF5 tornado in 1990, and then they overlay the
much larger town of Plainfield as it appears today over that same tornado's path-- the massive increase of homes and structures that would been obliterated today if that tornado had hit now instead of 22-years ago is jaw-dropping to say the least. And that kind of urban sprawl is happening all over the place, so there definitely are more people and property that are at risk from tornadoes than ever before.
In any case, I am very sorry to learn what happened to your wife's hometown, Buckshot. I can't even imagine how hard it must be to see your home or even your entire town get devastated by one of these storms. I wish both you and her the best.
