A new study shows that global warming may cause severe thunderstorms across the United States in the next decades.
Noah Diffenbaugh, lead author of the study from Stanford University, wrote that thunderstorms during springtime over the U.S. (more or less from the Rockies to the Atlantic) may be more severe by as much 40 percent by the end of the century.
Severe storms and tornadoes in the recent years have caused more devastation than any other weather phenomena and are usually one of the main reasons for catastrophic losses in the U.S. In 2012, damages caused by 11 weather disasters amounted to at least $1 billion and seven out of those weather disasters were caused by severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
“Regrettably, we have little knowledge about these severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in relation to climate change,” said Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters to the USA Today. Furthermore, tornado records for more than 50 years in the U.S. from the Storm Prediction Center claims that there is no rise in the number tornadoes across the U.S. and that there were lesser strong tornadoes.
According to researchers, a combination of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and vertical wind shear results to severe thunderstorms. CAPE is the air formed in the lower atmosphere which dictates the atmospheric instability helping meteorologists predict severe weather while the vertical wind shear is the changes of the wind speed and direction as it rises in the atmosphere.
Many past studies discovered that while CAPE increases due to global warming while vertical wind shear decreases. As a result, they cancel each other out leading to more catastrophic weather events.
"These severe thunderstorms can be very damaging events," Diffenbaugh told LiveScience.
This report is acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body reviewing reports about climate change and consolidating it for recommendations to lawmakers.
The study was published in the Sept. 23 issue of the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
