![]() ![]() We also know that you don’t need ENSO to get a lot of tornadoes-a year when ENSO is neutral sees on average around 1,200 tornadoes across the United States, with the majority occurring in the March to June window. However, the idea of a connection between ENSO and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes is not new, with some of the most tornado-active years in history being associated with La Niña (Marzban and Schaefer 2001, Cook and Schaefer 2008). How ENSO and tornadoes are relatedĬonnecting tornadoes to the larger climate system is a hard problem, as the frequency of tornadoes typically has large year-to-year variability. In this post, we consider the relevant factors and what this tells us about our capacity to predict seasonal tornado activity. ![]() A moderate La Niña was observed this past winter and was predicted to continue into the spring, leading to expectations and speculation in the media about a potentially active season. Many people will remember that the last extremely active tornado year, 2011, was a strong La Niña year. While there are many contributing sources of tornado variability, there is a relationship between El Niño/Southern Oscillation ( ENSO) and the frequency of tornadoes. To begin to address what happened in 2021, we need to go back to what these seasonal predictions are based on. ![]()
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