Climate Matters: Deadly severe storms hit Mid-MO amid abnormally warm temperatures

A strong early spring storm system on March 14th produced a number of severe storms and tornadoes in the area and resulted in the deadliest severe weather day in Missouri since the Joplin tornado. Severe storms are certainly not unusual in the springtime, but the excessively warm temperatures fueling this round of severe weather were atypical.

Newer scientific studies can allow scientists to calculate how much climate change contributed to these abnormal temperatures. Climate attribution studies are increasingly used to highlight the specific effects of climate change on severe outbreaks or hurricanes and other weather events.

Climate Central analyzed the recent round of severe storms that tracked across the Midwest a day before the outbreak got underway on March 14th. According to their Climate Shift Index, the warm temperatures that day were twice as likely to occur due to climate change.

Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with Climate Central, says there is growing confidence in these climate attribution studies. "It used to always be said that no one weather event could be tied to climate change. And that's not true anymore, now that we have attribution science." Winkley says.

Attribution studies do not give all the answers, but they can highlight the footprints of climate change. "It's not saying that these temperatures or this severe weather was made because of climate change," says Winkley. "It's how much more likely and how much more frequent unusually warm or unusually cool temperatures will be in a world with climate change."

Climate attribution science allows us to see the effects of climate change and gives us the opportunity to do something about it. "This helps us understand how humans have influenced the weather and the temperature and lets us understand that if this isn't a world that we want to continue to live in, or that we don't want to pass on to future generations, that we need to mitigate things and bring down our burning of coal and oil and natural gas," Winkley says.