winter tornadoes
2008-Jan-09, Wednesday 03:19 amYesterday, I was reading about the recent winter tornadoes and realized that I couldn't remember ever hearing of such weather phenomena before. More freaky stuff to blame on global warming, right? So I did some poking around and discovered that they're not as rare as I thought.
I found an article from the Monthly Weather Review that shows a nice picture (on page 2) of the distribution of tornadoes in 23 winter storms from 1950-1979.
More recently, NOAA produced an article researching the distribution patterns of winter storms between 1950 and 2003. Again, nice pictures (on page 2) show the difference in winter tornado distribution between years governed by El Nino versus La Nina weather patterns.
The weather here in Minnesota has been freakishly warm this week, but I'm willing to let the storms slide as typical (though uncommon) events.
I found an article from the Monthly Weather Review that shows a nice picture (on page 2) of the distribution of tornadoes in 23 winter storms from 1950-1979.
More recently, NOAA produced an article researching the distribution patterns of winter storms between 1950 and 2003. Again, nice pictures (on page 2) show the difference in winter tornado distribution between years governed by El Nino versus La Nina weather patterns.
The weather here in Minnesota has been freakishly warm this week, but I'm willing to let the storms slide as typical (though uncommon) events.