I’ve never lived in the Midwest anywhere near Tornado Alley and thus have no first-hand knowledge, but it seems to me that there have been an awful lot of them over the past few years, more than I remember from twenty or thirty years ago.
There were 866 in 1980, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Thirty years later there were 1,266. Despite that increase, NOAA says there’s no discernible trend, and it has charts to prove it.
So maybe I’m wrong in my impression, or maybe the violent ones have been so damaging that they stick in memory longer. Either way, they’re horrific, and the one which hit Oklahoma City and its suburbs today was no exception.
Best wishes to all those affected.
I think it just feels like it because of the way weather seems to be behaving oddly in the past decade, that these seem worse. As far as having more – it’s always up to the particular storm spawn. Some storms spawn multiple tornadoes, and some only single ones. It’s luck of the weather as to which you’ll get. But if a community gets slammed with multiples the results are usually severe. A certain percentage of the time they’re deadly – and the rest of the times they rip up trees and miss the populated areas.
When I lived in the tornado zones of KS, north TX, and AL (oddly Louisiana wasn’t too bad) we had regular tornadoes during the seasons. I’ve only escaped them since moving west of the Rockies, and am incredibly grateful. (I also don’t need to learn how many miles I am from each county to be able to gauge how much danger I’m in. Which was great for geography skills, but not so fun for stress.)
Actually the area for tornadoes is even larger than I’d realized – I thought it was more of a corridor, but over time the area is huge:
https://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/05/how-to-understand-the-scale-of-todays-oklahoma-tornado/
Check out the map with blue lines there.
The explanation seems clear to me.
SmartPhones & YouTube
LOL
Basic concept in advertising… To get attention – you need ART.
Well, that’s the short answer.
The long answer is…
In the past, there wasn’t enough exciting art to really get so much attention.
Seeing pictures of upsetting & depressing damage is actually far easier to ignore than exciting moving pictures of funnel clouds so easily accessible on demand.
And I wonder if there’s an uptick in tornado chasers. I don’t know if there is. But seems like there could be. What with there being more affordable & easily mobile technologies that allow people to chase storms more readily.