SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Images of Thursday's massive tornado in Oklahoma are extraordinary. A huge funnel of air, made black with dust and debris, tore through the town of Enid. At least 40 houses were damaged, but no deaths have been reported. Still, the massive size of the twister has experts pondering if there will be more. Professor Jana Houser is an associate professor of meteorology at the Ohio State University. She joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
JANA HOUSER: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: What conditions made that massive tornado possible Thursday?
HOUSER: On Thursday, we had a very classic tornado alley setup occurring. There was a large-scale low-pressure system in Canada, so it seems a little far away, but it has direct implications on what can happen throughout the southern plains. We had a large area of southerly flow bringing up warm and moist air from the Gulf of Mexico. That was coupled with dry air to the west, in a situation that we refer to as a dry line, and we had a cold front coming down from that surface low. We had warm, moist air at the surface. High up above that, we had really strong winds. We had cold air, so we had a situation of atmospheric instability where warm air is buoyant. It likes to rise freely if there's cold air above it. So everything kind of came together at the right place, at the right time. Enid was at kind of, like, a systematically perfect location that we refer to as the triple point, which is where the dry line intersects the cold front. So this is a very classic textbook example of a central plains tornado outbreak.
SIMON: Oklahoma, of course, has a history with tornadoes. How much of this is climate change?
HOUSER: That remains the million-dollar question. We have a difficult time parsing out the tornado signals from the larger-scale climate signals because tornadoes are very small-scale and localized events. Climate is very large-scale. We look at generalizations. We look at overall trends. In comparison to climate, tornadoes are going to be very sensitive to small-scale local contributions. And this is part of what makes tornadoes very difficult to predict in the first place because we have an environment that's largely potentially supportive of tornadoes over a pretty large area, but we only have one or two storms within that area that end up ultimately producing tornadoes. So it's very difficult to really tell what's climate change-related versus what's locally related. And more often than not, these tornadoes are forming in response to very specific non-climate conditions that are present at the local scale.
SIMON: The Trump administration's made significant cuts to the National Weather Service. Do you believe this has affected the prediction of tornadoes and the warning system?
HOUSER: The budget cuts that have been instituted by the Trump administration have had direct implications on the National Weather Service and their ability to do their job. One of the most fundamental pieces of information that we need to get to provide weather forecasts for the future is information about the atmosphere. And on a daily basis, the National Weather Service releases two balloons a day from select locations. Right now, because of a lack of resources between personnel resources and financial resources, many of those balloons are never being deployed in the first place. So we're not sampling the atmosphere thoroughly, and as a result, our forecast quality is deteriorating.
SIMON: Professor Houser, should the Midwest brace itself for more of these massive tornadoes in the coming days?
HOUSER: We are currently entering a time frame of very high activity. And just in the next couple of days, we're expecting to see more tornado activity from the traditional tornado alley regime northeastward into the Midwest states, such as Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin. Iowa and Wisconsin have already been hit very hard this spring with tornadoes. So we don't necessarily think the number of tornadoes is going to go up in the future, but on any given day, tornado outbreaks could be more extensive and could potentially be more severe.
SIMON: Professor Jana Houser at the Ohio State University. Thank you so much for being with us.
HOUSER: Well, thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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