Researchers say Tornado Alley is moving

Posted by colortheorystone@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Any thoughts on this video? I found it informative. Seems the weather is becoming less predictable. Does anyone have similar research in other areas of the world?

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moschles@reddit

Were you guys aware that in /r/tornado , the regular userbase believes that there is no "tornado alley" and that it is a myth created by bad stats?

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I wasn't aware that was their take. I could understand an argument that it's not a narrow band in the south, that anyone between the rockies and the appalachians was fair game regardless of latitude, but its definitely a thing. And the number of tornadoes has increased in the northern latitudes over the last decade. The Pittsburgh PA subreddit had a climate change struggle session about two months ago when one of our weather junkies dropped some stats on us. We've had more tornadoes in the last decade than the previous century combined. They're all still small, but the number is increasing so drastically its impossible to ignore. We didn't used to get them, now we do.

Also, as someone who was born in Texas, the way Pittsburgh uses sirens to signal fire fighters and EMS gave me serious anxiety the first few years I was here. That sound MEANS SOMETHING and they're just up here shaking the whole valley because someone had a fender bender. Dont know what we're going to do when the storms keep getting worse and we need to tell people to duck and cover more often.

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CocoanutVA@reddit

Pittsburgh's using tornado sirens for standard emergency services?

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theCaitiff@reddit

Yep.

Our fire stations up here are volunteer fire companies, each station also has a recognition pattern so you'll have [tornado siren] to get everyone's attention, then a morse code letter of long and short tones to tell you which fire house is calling the emergency.

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CocoanutVA@reddit

Huh... That's... One solution. Why not a piercing two tone? Or literally any other siren?

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theCaitiff@reddit

Two main reasons as far as I can tell.

First, tornado sirens are off the shelf components. You don't have to buy a specialized siren for each fire hall, just switch the power to the motor in the right pattern. We have 170 fire halls in Allegheny County, and ~95% of those are volunteer units as I mentioned. Outside the city of Pittsburgh itself, funding isn't exactly rolling in.

Second, as I mentioned in my earlier post, our county didn't GET tornados in the past. I mis-remembered earlier when I said we had more tornados in the last decade than the rest of the century. I had to go back to the thread where we dug into the statistics, it was fifty years. Regardless, we used to get one tornado every three or four years.

We didn't need to tell people to take shelter because of a storm. We did need a way to tell everyone that the fire hall needed first responders to haul ass.

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CocoanutVA@reddit

Alright, I think I understand the logic now.

How in the heck are y'all going to adapt to the increasing tornado threat then?