A weird few weeks for weather!
It has been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States. While the West braces for the peak of a record-breaking heatwave, massive snowstorms and hail pummel several states in the Midwest. Meanwhile, communities in the Southeast and along the East Coast contend with severe storms that could trigger flooding and wind damage throughout the region.
In certain areas, these storms could bring some of the deadliest weather disasters: tornadoes. Several tornadoes ransacked the Midwest in March 2026. A few twisters have already hit, including in Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina. Tornado warnings extended as far north as New Jersey.
This aligns with a subtle shift scientists have observed in the places these weather events hit, with rising tornado frequency across parts of the Northeast, the Southeast and the Midwest. At the same time, researchers have seen a decrease in the atmospheric conditions that support tornadoes in some parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado, where they have historically been a greater threat. There are some indications that climate change has played a part in this trend and slight changes in tornado behaviour in recent decades.
However, tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict and determining their climate connection is even harder, scientists say. While many questions remain, any changes in tornado activity and ranges could have major consequences for the more populated Southeast and East Coast.
March marked the start of the main severe weather season in the USA, so it is not necessarily surprising that storms, hail and tornado threats are occurring in different parts of the country simultaneously (the severity of the western heat wave is anomalous).
Spring atmospheric conditions often provide the ingredients conducive to storm development: moisture, instability, lift and wind shear. Instability emerges when warm air rises, while lift develops when that warm air collides with a cold front. But wind shear, the change in wind speed and direction as unstable air rises, is largely what sets apart tornado-producing thunderstorms.
Tornadoes are relatively rare, but the USA does experience around 1000 of them annually and violent twisters are especially dangerous; several of these tore through Southwest Michigan in March and killed four people.
So, is climate change supercharging these deadly whirlwinds, like so many other extreme weather events? The answer to this is complicated and largely open-ended at the moment.
Bob Henson, meteorologist, stated: “Each tornado is a localised creature, which makes it difficult to link directly to global climate trends.”
Still, some answers as to how tornado behaviour is changing over the long term are coming into focus. More data exists as storm chasers and social media users contribute photos and videos of tornadoes.
This can make it harder to determine whether changes are occurring or we are just keeping a closer eye on things, of course. But as scientists account for this, the tornadic activity is becoming more concentrated and it is happening less frequently in the spring and summer and more often in the fall and
winter.
Stephen Strader, an atmospheric scientist, has said that scientists are still working to unravel the influence of climate change but that even this modest increase, especially in the Southeast or Northeast, could have catastrophic impacts.
“A tornado going through the middle of nowhere Alabama is going to hit more things than a tornado going through the middle of nowhere Kansas,” Stephen said, adding that many homes in the Southeast are manufactured and extremely vulnerable to tornadoes. In fact, occupants in these types of home are as much as 20 times more likely to be killed than those living in site-built houses.
He explained it with one of the most iconic tornadoes in cinematic history: “In ‘The Wizard of Oz’, where you see Dorothy running to the shelter and there is a tornado dancing in the landscape behind her, that same scene is happening in the Southeast, except … it is not dancing through the field, it is dancing through a subdivision, through a forest, through all kinds of things that it will hit, and that means that there are greater impacts.”
Another possible by-product of severe convective storms is hail, formed when strong upward currents carry raindrops high enough to freeze. Measured by total financial costs in the USA, these icy balls take the cake over tornadoes, with hailstorms costing the USA $46 billion in 2023 alone. That represents around 80% of the losses from hail, tornadoes, wind and lightning-caused fires combined.
The influence of climate change on hailstorms is also clearer. A growing body of research shows that human-caused global warming is making large, destructive hail more likely. New research has, for the first time, linked human-caused warming with the size of hailstones in a single thunderstorm, this one in Paris.
In March 2026, supercell storms brought tornadoes and hail to Indiana and Illinois. Scientists identified a hailstone 7.125 inches wide, the biggest in Illinois state history, if verified!
Stephen does caution people to remember that “science is a slow process” and climate attribution research is complex.
This article and the information it contains has been extracted from various newspapers and publications in the USA.
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