Wild weather the norm so far in 2019

After quiet 2018, tornadoes, Midwest floods and Alaskan heat plague USA

Tornadoes in the South, floods and snow in the Midwest, crazy heat in Alaska. What’s going on with the extreme weather this year?

Most of it is par for the course, experts say, because we live in the nation with the world’s wildest weather extremes: No other country on Earth has the USA’s ferocious weather stew of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, wildfires, blizzards, heat waves and cold snaps.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find another patch of land on Earth the size of the USA that boasts such a variety of such intensely extreme weather,” said meteorologist and author Robert Henson of Boulder, Colo.

In April, severe weather outbreaks such as the one that hit the South on Sunday are the norm rather than the exception. So far this April, 48 tornadoes have hit the U.S., according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center. That’s still well below normal for mid-April. (On average, 115 tornadoes have hit by this time in April, said Patrick Marsh, the storm center’s warning coordination meteorologist.)

Tornadoes, such as the ones that slammed Texas on Wednesday, are nearly a uniquely American phenomenon. Each year, “the

U.S. experiences about

80% to 90% of all of the tornadoes that occur across the world,” says

Randy Cerveny, a professor of geography at Arizona State University.

While climate change does have a documented effect on many extreme weather events, it has no clear connection to severe thunderstorms nor the tornadoes they produce. In fact, a 2016 report from the National Academy of Sciences found that of all weather phenomena, severe storms have the least connection to human-caused climate change.

That’s not the case for other types of extreme weather, however: That report found there were clear links between climate change and heat waves, droughts, heavy rain and snowstorms.

Though it has made few headlines, some of the USA’s weirdest weather this year has been the extreme heat in Alaska this spring. Alaska had its warmest March since records began 95 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

The Alaska statewide March temperature was 26.7 degrees, a mind-boggling 15.9 degrees higher than the long-term average. Most monthly temperature records are broken by a few degrees, or even tenths of degrees.

No other country has America’s ferocious stew of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, fires, blizzards and heat waves.