Storms to get stronger - August 31, 2007
Another day, another ‘global warming will kill us all’ story. This one is from at team at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies who have worked out that a warmer atmosphere will mean storms are even stronger. Or, in AP’s words, we face “more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes”. LiveScience says global warming will make “severe thunderstorms and tornadoes a more common feature of US weather”.
While it has already been shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate a new climate model developed by NASA shows the strength of updrafts in these storms will also be stronger and more severe (press release). AP notes that on a normal sunny day updrafts are less than 1 mile per hour, in a severe storm they can top 20: the faster they are the worse the storm.
It’s not all doom and gloom though - the model also suggests while there will be stronger and more severe storms there will be fewer storms overall. As Wired notes: “for once, there’s a little good news along with the bad”.
The paper seems to have been published in Geophysical Research Letters (abstract) a couple of weeks ago, but only press released yesterday.
Image: Getty