At least three people were confirmed dead on Saturday morning after storms roared through Tennessee overnight, officials said.
Sirens had howled overnight in the state as the winds swept through, climbing to faster than 80 miles per hour.
Two people died in storms in Lake County and one in Obion County, in the western part of the state, said Dean Flener, a spokesman for the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. Search-and-rescue operations were continuing throughout the state on Saturday morning, he said.
“Even though the weather is moving out, it’s still dark here and it’ll be a bit before the locals are able to go out and do thorough damage assessments and get a handle on any of that,” he said shortly after 6 a.m. — Daniel Victor and Rick Rojas
Tornadoes are relatively small, short-lived weather events. And scientists are not yet able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of tornadoes, in part because they have a limited data record.
But researchers say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater “clusters,” and that a so-called tornado alley in the Great Plains — where most tornadoes occur — appears to be shifting eastward.
“This is what we would call a tornado outbreak, where you have a storm system which produces a number of tornadoes over a large geographical area,” Dan Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said on Friday.
But such a large and powerful system in December is highly unusual, and something the region usually experiences in May or April.
“It’s certainly not unheard of,” he said of tornadoes this late in the year, “but to have an outbreak of this magnitude, with this many tornado reports — it’s a little unusual for this time of year.”
Temperatures in Arkansas and Kansas on Friday were “spring weather,” Mr. Pydynowski said. Highs were in the 70s and 80s.
“It was unusually warm, and there was moisture in place,” he said, “and you had a strong cold front end. These are the ingredients for big storms in the spring, but not in mid-December.”
Comments