Twister sisters in USA’s southeast take 300 lives and devastate region

[Peter Kinsley, Natural Disaster News Contributor]

Huffington Post: The tornadoes that wreaked havoc across southeast USA last week have caused the USA’s ‘deadliest twister disaster in nearly 40 years’.

The twisters took close to three hundred lives and turned vast, densely populated territories in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina states into disaster zones.

Joshua Wurman, one of the world’s leading weather disaster experts and president of the Center for Severe Weather Research is reported to have said: “In my career I have never seen this many tornadoes or this many fatalities”.

April 2011 has broken all previous records so far: six hundred tornadoes of different magnitude have swept over the planet, thrice the amount of the so far windiest April of 1974 which brought 267 twisters. The surge is so great that scientists are wondering whether climate change might be the reason.

A 2008 report from the U.S. Global Change and Research Program, a federal inter-agency project under the supervision of  the White House, found that increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could lead to an increase in severe storm conditions that make tornadoes possible. However, opinions vary  whether climate change is the culprit behind the USA’s current extreme weather conditions.

According to Howard Bluestein, meteorology professor at Oklahoma University. “This is something that happens every 10 or 20 years when everything comes together like this. This is just natural variability.”

Related Articles

• Tornadoes and storms in the USA (lg10e.wordpress.com)
• Storm chasers flock to glut of tornadoes (capitolhillblue.com)
• Pray for all tornado victims in the USA (ptl2010.wordpress.com)
• Gallery | Remembering the Dunwoody tornado of ’98 | ajc.com (writeswift.wordpress.com)
• More Incredible Footage of the Monster Killer Tornadoes that hit Alabama and the Southeast. (thenationalbugle.com)
• Stats on the Deadly Tornado Outbreak in the South (scientificamerican.com)
• Tornado Warnings – What Do We Do (godspace.wordpress.com)
• Utah storms may be tornado indicators for South, Midwest ()
• Tornado Devastation (boastinginmyweakness.com)
• Tornado Record Set, 292 Reported in April and 193 Dead (brittaj17.wordpress.com)

Tags: Alabama, Georgia, Joshua Wurman, Oklahoma University, South Carolina, Tornado, United States, White House