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Tornado season is peaking earlier, growing more volatile

"From a public safety perspective, if this trend (of an earlier tornado season) is indeed occurring, then people need to begin preparing for severe weather earlier in the year," said Greg Carbin.

By Brooks Hays
Dark skies threaten as a shopping center sits destroyed in Joplin, Missouri on May 23, 2011. An EF-5 tornado hit the town on May 22, killing more than 150 people and injuring more than 1,000 others. UPI/Tom Uhlenbrock
Dark skies threaten as a shopping center sits destroyed in Joplin, Missouri on May 23, 2011. An EF-5 tornado hit the town on May 22, killing more than 150 people and injuring more than 1,000 others. UPI/Tom Uhlenbrock | License Photo

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- New research suggests that peak tornado season in the central and southern Great Plains -- so-called Tornado Alley -- is inching earlier and earlier each year, arriving nearly two weeks sooner than it did 50 years ago.

A team of researchers working with the American Geophysical Union looked at tornado records from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas, and found that peak activity for all categories of tornadoes shifted seven days earlier between 1954 to 2009.

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"If we take Nebraska out [of the data], it is nearly a two-week shift earlier," explained John Long, a researcher at Montana State University and lead author of the new study -- published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Researchers said their study doesn't attribute the shift to any single factor, but did acknowledge that a warming planet could encourage an earlier tornado season.

"From a public safety perspective, if this trend (of an earlier tornado season) is indeed occurring, then people need to begin preparing for severe weather earlier in the year," added Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

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Meanwhile, another study, published this week in the same journal, suggests tornado seasons have grown more volatile since 2000. By this, researchers mean tornado activity is changing more dramatically from one year to the next -- a supremely severe year (1,900 tornadoes reported in 2011) followed by a dull year (937 confirmed tornados in 2012).

While such volatility prior to 2000 could be explained by changes in reporting methods and population shifts, these factors aren't able to explain the increased volatility over the last decade.

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