Four tornadoes — two in Erie County, one in Chautauqua County and one in Genesee County — touched down in Western New York, according to the National Weather Service in Buffalo. The strongest of those, an EF-2 that touched down in the Town of Eden, reached wind speeds of up to 115 mph and caused the “total destruction” of “multiple” buildings. A state of emergency was declared in Eden, and the town is still recovering.
WBFO’s Grant Ashley spoke with Scott Rochette, a meteorology professor at SUNY Brockport, on Thursday about why twisters are so rare in Western New York, how the weather service identifies tornadoes, and weather climate change could the storms more common in the Northeast. You can read the full transcript of their conversation here:
GRANT ASHLEY: To go back to yesterday, could you tell me a little bit about what your reaction was as you were kind of watching this severe weather unfold across the region?
SCOTT ROCHETTE: I was jealous.
ASHLEY: Tell me about that.
ROCHETTE: Actually we just got back from a storm chasing trip about five or six weeks ago, and we saw several storms, but only one was tornadic, and we didn’t even know it at the time because the tornado funnel was wrapped in rain. We got some really good pictures of the storm, we just didn’t realize there was a tornado in it. And so to have all this stuff going down yesterday, like, “Oh man.” Most people would be, you know, they’re not going to be excited, they’ll be scared to see a tornado. I’m excited as long as it’s not in my neighborhood.
ASHLEY: Right, as long as your house isn’t in the line of fire, so to speak.
ROCHETTE: Yes, exactly. It’s very rare that you see that level of threat forecast for this area. It was very well predicted, and it was very well handled by the National Weather Service Office in Buffalo. That kind of thing does not happen in New York every day.
ASHLEY: And, you know, you mentioned this, we don’t get tornadoes very frequently in Western New York. I was really surprised to see them in the forecast. I think a lot of people were too. Why are tornadoes so rare here?
ROCHETTE: It’s basically because we don’t often get the kind of instability that we need to get really vigorous thunderstorms. We do get them, obviously. I mean, we do get unstable air, especially during the summer. But the lakes do influence things because the waters are still relatively cool, especially in the earlier part of summer. That tends to make the atmosphere around the area a little more stable, but it can also help focus thunderstorm development, a little bit away from the lakes as well. But we don’t get the kind of instabilities that you see out in the Midwest, say. And so we don’t get really vigorous thunderstorms happening to that same extent as you would in the Midwest. And so severe weather is really rare, OK, because it requires all these ingredients to come together in the same place at the same time. We can get really unstable air happening, it’s just not as frequent.
ASHLEY: Why does it take so long to confirm tornadoes? What’s involved in that process?
ROCHETTE: Meteorologists from the National Weather Service offices have to go out into the field and do what’s called a storm survey. It means literally putting boots on the ground. Fortunately, now we have drones that can take pictures from above, and that really helps things along. But again, it requires interviewing people, it requires going out and looking at damage patterns. And there are certain things that that the surveyors will see in the damage patterns that are caused by straight line wind damage, which can be as strong as a weak tornado in a lot of cases. But of course, immediately, when strong damage happens, [people think] it’s a tornado, but that’s really not the case. And that’s why the surveyors have to go into the field and actually look and see what damage occurred and what kind of patterns it showed in order to determine whether or not a tornado did occur. A number of the warnings that got issued were all what are called radar-detected tornadoes, because there’s a circulation pattern that was evident in the radar field that said this storm is rotating. So, there are essentially two types of tornado warning: radar-detected, and one where a funnel was actually spotted. So these surveys can take a long time because a lot of these places — they’re out in fields or in forests, and, you know, it’s not easy to get to them, so it requires a little bit of literal legwork to get to those places. And there’s only so many meteorologists in the office working that can go out and do a storm survey. So, when there’s 18 individual sites to survey, it’s going to take a little bit to get to them all.
ASHLEY: OK, interesting. So we won’t really understand the full impact of this storm for a couple more days, sounds like.
ROCHETTE: Easily, easily. And I’ve never done a storm survey, but I can’t imagine that it’s just a 15-minute [process]: “Hey, OK, that looks good.” No, it’s getting down and talking to people and looking at stuff and getting drone photographs and coming to the conclusion that, “Yes, these were straight-line winds,” or “This was a tornado.”
ASHLEY: Right. I guess, you know, could you tell me a little bit about how unprecedented this is? I can’t think of a time when, you know, we had this many tornadoes in the area. Is there a historic analog to this, or not really?
ROCHETTE: The one event that I come back to was this tornado outbreak in May of 1985. It was a really significant outbreak of severe weather and tornadoes for New York and Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. So no, these kinds of things really don’t happen very often. And that’s a good thing. It really is. I mean, I have people who’ve asked me, “How can you live in Western New York?” And I say, “Well, because the weather eight months of the year is pretty good, and I don’t have to worry about it.” I can shovel snow. I don’t want to shovel debris. But yeah, these things, they do happen, but, you know, I want to say that the Buffalo Weather Service Office usually issues a couple of tornado warnings a year for their forecast area. So, it’s obviously not a very common thing, but these kinds of outbreaks are definitely rare.
ASHLEY: Last question before I let you go: this is the product of a pretty powerful hurricane. Should we be expecting more events like this in the future, given climate change, or is this kind of a one-off freak event?
ROCHETTE: Oh, that’s hard to say because there’s a big difference between weather and climate. Climate is what you expect, and weather is what you get. That’s the best explanation I can think of. But the climate is getting warmer. Storms are getting more intense. They’re getting wetter. There’s more moisture being incorporated in them. And so it’s a very distinct possibility that more frequent and more significant severe weather is possible. But again, it does require a whole host of things to come together at once, and that itself is pretty rare. I mean, just to put it into perspective, you could sit in a field anywhere in Oklahoma and wait for a tornado — any random place in Oklahoma, which is a place that gets tornadoes very frequently — and you could live your entire lifetime without ever seeing one because they’re that random. That said, with an atmosphere that is getting increasingly warm, there’s a decent chance that we will start to see more significant severe weather happening in places that may not have seen it nearly as much — which really is frightening because if it’s happening more frequently here, then it’s probably going to happen more frequently in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas as well. And that’s probably the last thing they need.
ASHLEY: Alright, well thank you so much.
ROCHETTE: Yeah, thank you, have a good day.