At least five people are dead and more than 100 injured after tornadoes swept across Oklahoma over the weekend. The severe weather came less than 36 hours after more than 100 tornadoes leveled homes and buildings in six states on Friday, with Nebraska and Iowa being hit hardest.
Tornadoes in the nation's midsection are not a surprise, especially during the springtime. But so many of them all at once can be alarming.
"There's the moist, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico kind of interacting with drier air from the mountains. And in the plains areas, that's the kind of recipe for severe weather," Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology and climate science at San Jose State University, told KCBS Radio. "These big thunderstorms with lightning and hail, heavy downpours of rain. And sometimes, a lot of tornado outbreaks."
While there's nothing we can do to stop tornadoes from happening, technology has advanced over the years to help meteorologists more accurately predict and forecast severe storms that could potentially produce twisters.
"We have some interesting instruments that can kind of peer in to these weather systems and see what are the winds like, what's the rainfall like, so we can better understand the evolution of these systems. And then that allows us to ultimately do better predictions, which is our key goal," said Cordero. "If we can predict where and when these things happen with more certainty, then that actually helps people in very important ways."
While it seems like storms are becoming more intense, researchers are actively trying to determine how climate change and a warming planet are affecting tornadoes.
"We don't have an abundance of evidence to show that there's more of them today than there used to be or that they're more severe," he said. "But certainly the conditions because of climate change, we have more heat on the planet, that adds more water vapor into the atmosphere, and we're certainly seeing more heavy rainfall across the world and across our country."
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , 2023 was a historic year in the number of costly disasters and extremes throughout much of the country. There were 28 weather and climate disasters last year, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020 -- tallying a price tag of at least $92.9 billion.
"2023 is the fourth consecutive year in which 18 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events have impacted the U.S., marking a consistent pattern that is becoming the new normal," NOAA said in a statement. "The 1980–2023 annual average is 8.5 events; the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2019–2023) is 20.4 events."
NOAA said 2023 was also deadly, causing at least 492 direct or indirect fatalities — the 8th most disaster-related fatalities for the U.S. since 1980.
The costliest 2023 events were the Southern/Midwestern Drought and Heat Wave ($14.5 billion) and the Southern and Eastern Severe Weather in early March ($6.0 billion). Adding the 2023 events to the record that began in 1980, the U.S. has sustained 376 weather and climate disasters with the overall damage costs reaching or exceeding $1 billion. The cumulative cost for these 376 events exceeds $2.660 trillion, according to NOAA.
Over the last seven years, from 2017 to 2023, 137 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,500 people and cost more than $1 trillion in damage, per NOAA.
"One of the drivers of this cost is that the U.S. has been impacted by landfalling Category 4 or 5 hurricanes in five of the last seven years, including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, Michael, Laura, Ida, and Ian," the agency said. "The U.S. was spared a major hurricane impacting a major metropolitan area in 2023, as Category 3 Hurricane Idalia made landfall in the less populated Big Bend region of Florida."
From 1980-2000, data shows about 75% of all disaster-related costs were due to billion-dollar disasters, and by 2010, the percentage had risen to about 80%. By 2023, it has risen to more than 85% of all disaster-related costs. Exposure, vulnerability, and climate change are all reasons why disasters are happening more frequently, according to NOAA.
"The number and cost of weather and climate disasters are increasing in the U.S. due to a combination of increased exposure (i.e., more assets at risk), vulnerability (i.e., how much damage a hazard of given intensity — wind speed or flood depth, for example — causes at a location), and the fact that climate change is increasing the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters," NOAA said.
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