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Apple Grove Lutheran Church in Argyle was leveled by a tornado on June 22. Tornadoes are beginning earlier in the year in Wisconsin, and they’re touching down more often.
Wisconsin’s tornado season looks different from decades ago. Tornadoes are beginning earlier in the year, and they’re touching down more often, although scientists aren’t sure whether those trends will continue.
“It’s pretty clear that climate change is having an impact on all weather, including extreme weather,” said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University. “The question is, really, to what degree?”
At the same time, the number of tornado events has decreased in states like Texas and Oklahoma — though the region known colloquially as “tornado alley” still sees more tornado activity than any other part of the country.
If current trends continue, Gensini said, that area with the highest concentration of tornadoes could continue expanding northward and eastward and include Wisconsin.
This has already been an unusually active tornado season in Wisconsin.
The state has been hit by 39 tornadoes so far, well above the annual average of 23, the National Weather Service said Tuesday. It’s the fourth-most tornadoes recorded in Wisconsin in a single year so far this century, weather records show.
Nine of those tornadoes touched down in southern Wisconsin on June 22, including a pair of EF-2s in Janesville, in Rock County, and near Argyle in Lafayette County, that damaged homes and leveled a church, and an EF-1 in the town of Medina, in Dane County, that mangled a farm and a nearby recycling center.
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Climate change is easy to link to phenomena such as more heat waves and heavier rainfall, Gensini said. As global temperatures rise, abnormally hot weather occurs more often. Warmer air can hold more moisture.
The factors that influence tornadoes are harder to pin down.
“There are two key ingredients for tornadoes,” said Steve Vavrus, Wisconsin’s state climatologist. The first ingredient is warm, humid air in the lower atmosphere that rises and fuels thunderstorms. The second is a strong jet stream that adds spin to the rising column of air.
Jannine Klecker shows some of the debris behind her home after a tornado hit her family’s farm in the town of Medina on June 22. Wisconsin has been hit by 39 tornadoes so far this year, well above the annual average of 23.
Tornadoes remain a wild card partly because climate change is expected to push those factors in opposite directions.
“The future climate is likely to be warmer and more humid,” Vavrus said. “But at the same time, we’re expecting a weaker jet stream, particularly in the summer, over much of the United States. And so it’s kind of a tug of war.”
Some of today’s climate models indicate that Wisconsin will continue to see an increase in the frequency of tornadoes, Gensini said. But “we don’t really have enough data right now to draw that conclusion — to say, you know, climate change is definitively causing this to happen.”
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Tornadoes are notoriously hard to study. While forecasters are increasingly able to identify when and where tornadoes will form, pinpointing their locations ahead of time is still a challenge. Most tornadoes only spend a few minutes on the ground and leave paths that are rarely more than a few hundred meters wide.
“We don’t have a really good way right now to measure the intensity of tornadoes, other than we wait for the tornado to occur, and then we go see what it hit,” Gensini said.
Jannine Klecker receives a hug from Brett Enterline, who grew up next door to Klecker, during cleanup efforts after a June 22 tornado at Klecker Farms in the town of Medina.
When tornadoes travel through remote areas without hitting any objects, meteorologists are left with few tools to gauge their wind speeds retroactively, Gensini said. Aside from the handful of tornadoes that pass over scientific instruments each year, “we’re relying on what the tornado actually hits, and so that biases kind of how we can rate these tornadoes and understand their intensity,” he said.
A Wisconsin church was destroyed by a tornado. The congregation came there for church anyway.
Scientists are more confident about one thing: In Wisconsin, tornado season is expanding.
“Right now, June is our primary month for tornadoes,” Vavrus said. The vast majority of the state’s tornadoes have been recorded between May and August.
Kiersten Stark shows the race shop that was damaged by a tornado on June 22 at her home in the town of Medina.
Tornadoes are most common in Wisconsin in the late spring and early summer because there is plenty of warm, humid air in the lower atmosphere and a strong jet stream in the upper atmosphere, he said. In the winter, the jet stream is strong, but the air isn’t warm enough. Later in the summer, the air is still hot and humid, but the jet stream is weaker.
Climate change is projected to cause warmth and humidity to coincide with a strong jet stream more often during months when tornadoes have historically been rare.
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“If the ingredients required to create a tornado come together in the atmosphere, it doesn’t matter where it’s at, and it doesn’t matter what time of the year it is,” Gensini said.
Tornado season could stretch in both directions as the planet warms, resulting in more events like the Feb. 8 storm that produced Wisconsin’s first February tornado on record, Vavrus said.
“This year it was February,” he said. “Next year, it might be December.”
Alysabeth Lantz finds the wooden cross made by her great-grandfather in the debris the morning after Apple Grove Lutheran Church in Argyle was leveled by a tornado on June 22.
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Six tornadoes formed over five counties in the region between 5:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, the National Weather Service confirmed.
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Apple Grove Lutheran Church in Argyle was leveled by a tornado on June 22. Tornadoes are beginning earlier in the year in Wisconsin, and they’re touching down more often.
Jannine Klecker shows some of the debris behind her home after a tornado hit her family’s farm in the town of Medina on June 22. Wisconsin has been hit by 39 tornadoes so far this year, well above the annual average of 23.
Jannine Klecker receives a hug from Brett Enterline, who grew up next door to Klecker, during cleanup efforts after a June 22 tornado at Klecker Farms in the town of Medina.
Kiersten Stark shows the race shop that was damaged by a tornado on June 22 at her home in the town of Medina.
Alysabeth Lantz finds the wooden cross made by her great-grandfather in the debris the morning after Apple Grove Lutheran Church in Argyle was leveled by a tornado on June 22.
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