As Gensini explained
We started digging into the data a little bit and lo and behold we started to find these very subtle shifts in counts of tornadoes away from the areas of the Great Plains and further to the east.”
There is good evidence to support this, although scientists are still trying to understand why. But Gensini is not the only atmospheric scientist that accepts the emerging evidence.
Harold Brooks, senior research scientist from the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, agrees with these findings.
“We do know also that there’s evidence that the jetstream pattern has changed over the last 40 years,” Brooks told TWN.
According to the recent research published by IOP Science, scientists have seen “a geographical shift of the nucleus (central impact location) towards the southeast United States. This spatial shift is also accompanied by reduced spatial variance, suggesting LTOs (large tornado outbreaks) have become less dispersed (or more localized) in the recent period.”
The findings also report that the frequency over a data collection period between 1950-2019 display less frequency of large tornado outbreaks and reports.
“The arrival rate has changed from 124 days during 1950–1980 to 164 days during 1977–2007 and remained relatively constant during later periods, indicating that LTOs are becoming less frequent,” the report stated.
What is still unclear is whether there is direct correlation to the jet stream pattern changing and what’s happening at the surface in Tornado Alley. The data supports fewer days with tornadoes, but more days with 30 or more tornadoes. It also appears that more tornadoes are occurring in the deep south, which includes Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, through the mid-south and as far north as Ohio.
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