That WAS A Tornado Outbreak Saturday In New York/New England

Tornado damage in Levittown, Long Island. Photo via'
Twitter CBS New York

 That storm we've been talking about that hit Saturday produced a bonafide tornado outbreak in New York and New England, National Weather Service meteorologists confirmed on Sunday.

The National Weather Service office in Upton, New York (the New York Cit area) confirmed three tornadoes on Long Island and three in southwestern Connecticut. 

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service in Boston/Norton Massachusetts confirmed three tornadoes in Rhode Island Saturday. 

That's a total of nine tornadoes in a geographic area a little smaller than Vermont. 

Though all the tornadoes were on the weak side, this is still extraordinary for November. This is the first time on record twisters had been confirmed during November in Rhode Island and on Long Island. At one point Saturday, two tornadoes were simultaneously on the ground around Islip, Long Island. 

Two of the Rhode Island tornadoes crossed into the state from eastern edge of Connecticut, which means that state technically had five tornadoes Saturday.  

We have to give a shoutout here to the town of Westerly, Rhode Island. I think I mentioned this yesterday, but it's still worth noting.  Two tropical storms  (Elsa and Henri) made landfall there earlier this year. The chances of two tropical storms making landfall in one particular town in one year is infinitesimally small .

Then - remember this is a New England town - one of Saturday's tornadoes hit Westerly. I guess they've had a bad weather year!  

Of course you can't entirely blame climate change for this unprecedented tornadic weather, but, yes, it might have been an influence. 

Here's why: 

Tornadoes are normally creatures of warm, steamy air. That's a key ingredient for them. By October in the Northeast, it's usually too cold for tornadoes. Yet this isn't the first outbreak of severe weather in the Northeast since the beginning of October.

Currently, the waters off the Northeastern seaboard are at record high levels.  As the Washington Post reports, climate change is making this area of the Atlantic Ocean warm particularly fast.   The warm waters fed a dynamic, intense storm system the necessary heat and moisture, contributing to Saturday's rough weather.  

Unusually warm waters off the Northeast Coast, driven
by climate change, seems to be contributing to
severe autumn weather and intense nor'easters
in the region. 

We've seen this a few times in Vermont this autumn.  While we had no tornadoes, we did have some pretty intense storms, including severe thunderstorms on October 16 and on Saturday. 

As this ocean warming trend continues, autumn severe weather outbreaks and tornadoes could become more common in the Northeast.

While I doubt there will be any more tornadoes in the Northeast this month or next, the warm waters off the coast could provide more Northeastern weather trouble. Including for us here in Vermont. 

Nor'easters are pretty common in the late fall and winter, as we well know. Warmer than normal ocean waters can make these storms even more intense than they otherwise would be. The warm water probably contributed to the force of an intense nor'easter that raked coastal Massachusetts with wind gusts of up to 94 mph in late October.

That warm water is still sitting out there, so any nor'easter that comes along in the next few weeks or even longer could get surprisingly intense. That brings the prospect of damaging winds and destructive storm surges along the coast.

Here in Vermont, if any of these nor'easters move close enough to the coast, we could see high winds and especially particularly deep and intense snowstorms.  We had an example of this last December, when a storm being fed by that warm ocean water dumped more than 40 inches of snow on southern Vermont on December 16-17.

So yeah, crazy as it seems, climate change can produce big snowstorms.