Tornadoes Becoming More Frequent

5/17/2018 (Permalink)

There once was a time when you rarely heard about a tornado threat in Massachusetts.  These frightening and sometimes deadly storms were rarely on any New Englander's radar.

However, according to Weather.com, tornado outbreaks have been producing more tornadoes and more deaths in recent years, according to a new study.

Published in the online journal Nature Communications, the findings revealed tornado "clusters" are more dangerous now than they've been since at least 1954. Responsible for 79 percent of tornado fatalities in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., these outbreaks often leave damage totals in the billions, the study also found.

"These discoveries suggest that the risks from tornado outbreaks are rising far faster than previously recognized," Joel Cohen, a mathematical population biologist and head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University in New York and Columbia's Earth Institute, told Live Science.

Using NOAA tornado records from 1954 to 2014, the scientists studied events when at least six tornadoes rated EF1 or higher were spawned in a 6-hour span. In calculating the average number of tornadoes spawned by each of these clusters, the findings revealed an average of 15 twisters per outbreak from 2004 to 2014. In the 1950s, the average was just 10.