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Rare winter tornadoes strike US Midwest, at least 3 killed
Jan 8, 2008, 21:21 GMT
Washington - Unseasonably warm weather sparked a rash of tornadoes in parts of the Midwest United States through Tuesday, flattening houses and mobile homes and killing at least 3 people in Missouri, the National Weather Service said.
About 40 tornadoes have been spotted in the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin since Monday, buoyed by record high temperatures in parts of the region.
Two women, aged 53 and 85, were killed in Missouri and dozens were injured Monday, and another person died in the state Tuesday. Tornado warnings remained in effect in some areas through Tuesday afternoon as heavy rain and even hail continued to pore down, the National Weather Service said.
Hundreds of people spent Monday night in city shelters as numerous flattened homes and downed power lines were reported. The storms were expected to tail off by Tuesday evening but flooding remained a threat for the coming days. Flash floods also sparked evacuations of towns in north-west Indiana as a river dam was threatening to burst.
© 2008 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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JohnJan 9th, 2008 - 10:15:54
These 'rare' weather events will become more common, in line with global warming predictions -
Global warming may cause the temperature difference between the poles and the equator to decrease. and as the difference decreases, so should the number of storms, says George Tselioudis, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University.
But even as a warming climate might decrease the overall number of storms that form, it could INCREASE THE NUMBER OF INTENSE storms. As temperatures continue to rise, more and more water vapor could evaporate into the atmosphere, and water vapor is the fuel for storms. “If we are creating an atmosphere more loaded with humidity, any storm that does develop has greater potential to develop into an intense storm,” says Tselioudis.
The combined result of increased temperatures over land, decreased equator-versus-pole temperature differences, and increased humidity could be increasingly intense cycles of droughts and floods as more of a region’s precipitation falls in a single large storm rather than a series of small ones.
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