MADISON, Wis. — The multi-day system that brought heavy snow and blizzard-like conditions to parts of the Midwest and Great Plains and deadly tornadoes to the South was unusual in a number of ways, but drawing a definitive link to climate change is challenging, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor said Friday.
The storm dropped as much as two to four feet of snow in parts of Minnesota and South Dakota and tornadoes in areas of the country that usually see them more in late winter, but Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at UW-Madison, said it’s not as simple as drawing a direct line between this week’s winter storm and a warming climate.
Still, warmer air can hold more moisture, which could mean a storm would be able to drop more rain or snow than if the air was colder.
Warmer weather can also mean lakes are frozen for shorter periods, making even more water available to evaporate into the atmosphere.
“How exactly to unravel the climate change signal in the context of well-understood and fairly common type of development is a very difficult question,” Martin said. “There’s people who are trying to do that; I’m a little skeptical, as it stands now, that they can really come to definitive conclusions about that. But there’s no doubt that with a background change, that would modify, thereby increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, there’s bound to be instances where otherwise storms of a certain strength are going to be able to ring out more water in the form of snow or heavy rain and ice than the could 50 or 100 years ago.”
This week’s storm came exactly one year after a severe weather system dropped seven tornadoes in parts of Wisconsin. That is more uncommon than what the state saw this week, he said, but data suggests the extent of the pool of cold air in the winter in the northern hemisphere is shrinking and has been for at least 75 years.
“Unusual tornadic activity this far north this late in the year is really hard to suggest that that’s not part of the expanded reality that we have to confront with the warming climate,” Martin said. “Things on the edges are going to start popping up with a little more frequency than they used to because things are warmer, because the atmosphere has a wavier structure to its mid- and upper-tropospheric flow… (but) the severity of weather systems, even in the wintertime, that we might expect in a warmer climate seems paradoxical, but there’s plenty of good reasons that point toward that.”
Download the First Warn Weather app to stay up-to-date on current weather conditions and the latest forecast.
COPYRIGHT 2022 BY CHANNEL 3000. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
