Tornados are behaving strangely: The number of tornado outbreaks per year is fairly constant, but the number of tornados per outbreak has skyrocketed. And scientists aren't entirely sure why.
In an effort to learn more, researchers looked at meteorological factors related to tornado outbreaks and then dug into the data to see whether these factors had changed over time, said study lead researcher Michael Tippett, an associate professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University.
The analyses did yield a result, but an unexpected one, Tippett said.
In the following years, Tippett and other scientists published studies on tornado clusters, a sequence of six or more tornadoes that happen within several days of one another. In the new study, Tippett and his colleagues found that the number twisters in the most extreme outbreaks have increased over the years, making these clusters more dangerous than in the past, he said.
"The fact that they can explain the tornado changes by storm relative helicity changes is, in one aspect, not surprising (it's a much better predictor of whether a storm will make a tornado than CAPE is)," Brooks wrote in an email to Live Science. "But, in another aspect, [the results are] difficult to explain. We don't really have a good conceptual model for why high SRH values should increase as the planet warms."
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