A week ago, a series of tornadoes ripped through eastern Alabama and western Georgia, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. A rural area of Lee County, Alabama — the county that is home to my alma mater, Auburn University — caught the brunt of the killer storms, which left 23 people there dead. Mobile homes were blown apart; brick houses were flattened; cars and trucks were wrapped around trees.
Tornadoes such as this brutal one — nearly a mile wide and bringing winds that had the force of a Category 5 hurricane — don’t strike only on the flat plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. Parts of Alabama, too, have long been a part of “Dixie alley,” where tornadoes are common. As a native of the southern part of the state, I remember them from my childhood.
But over the last 20 or so years, climate scientists say, tornadoes have increased in frequency and severity, in Alabama and elsewhere. Columbia University professor Michael K. Tippett has published research indicating that tornadoes have become more common since the 1970s. “The frequency of tornado outbreaks (clusters of tornadoes) and the number of extremely powerful tornado events have been increasing over nearly the past half-century in the United States,” he and fellow researchers wrote in Science in 2016.
View the complete March 9 article by Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.