“People are paying attention and they are realizing it’s just not Oklahoma and Kansas anymore, it can happen here,” explains Meteorologist Christine Wielgos with the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Paducah. Having worked with the NWS since 2000, Wielgos says she has seen firsthand the rise in the number of tornadoes in our area.
“I have seen a market increase in not only the number of tornadoes,” says Wielgos, “but the tornadoes that we’re seeing seasonally, the path lengths we’re seeing, the strengths of the tornadoes we’re seeing.”
The research compared the number of tornadoes, EF-1 or stronger, between two time periods: 1951 to 1985, and 1986 to 2020. The highest rates of increase in tornadoes between the two periods are over Mississippi and western Kentucky. Further west, a higher decreased rate is shown in blue over traditional Tornado Alley.
Using the same time period, Paducah’s four-state region saw the number of tornadoes nearly triple, from 279 between 1951 and 1986 to well 780 between 1986 and 2020. The number of stronger tornadoes, rated EF-3 or higher, remained the same during both time periods. Wielgos says a big reason for this jump is likely due to advancements in weather technology.
“Prior to 1973, so a good chunk of that first chunk of data that they looked at, you didn’t have damage surveys,” explains Wielgos. “Well now that we have the technology that we have and we have the science and the research to back it up, we’re realizing that it’s possible some of that wind damage that went down in the books in the early to mid 90s a lot of them were probably from tornadoes.”
Dr. Dan Chavas with Purdue University’s atmospheric science department says more understanding will be needed to determine how tornado activity could continue to shift. “Could we have more tornadoes in the future, fewer, will it change the regions where they occur? That depends, again, on understanding fundamentally why are they there in the first place,” says Dr. Chavas.
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