Janie DeVore and Pamela Hume don’t hesitate when they hear tornado sirens.
DeVore lived through a tornado with her then-husband John DeVore from the basement of their Utica home in 2004. Hume survived a 2015 tornado by taking shelter with her husband and son in a bathroom in their Coal City home.
Both women are now significantly more alarmed at the mere threat of severe weather.
Hume lost her house in a matter of seconds when 60-plus mph winds “peeled [the roof] back like a sardine can,” she said.
“I pay attention to the weather a lot better now for storm warnings and how the sky looks. … I get nervous because I don’t think I could go through another tornado and lose everything,” Hume said.
The DeVores’ home was torn apart, and their garage was completely destroyed.
“It kind of seemed like 15-20 seconds,” John DeVore, 65, said. “It was kind of one of those deals where I had absolutely no control over what was happening, which is kind of a weird feeling.”
Janie DeVore, 62, said the tornado “upended” her life.
“I still kind of get a little PTSD sometimes,” she said, adding she immediately goes to her basement when severe weather looms. “I really had a hard time. I had to go to a counselor for quite awhile after the tornado.”
Hume and the DeVores say tornadoes have seemingly spun up more often across the Chicago region in the last decade compared to years prior.
Numbers support their notion. Illinois’ 122 tornadoes this year have already surpassed last year’s total of 118, which was the most in the country. And the Chicago area broke a record last month with 31 twisters spawning in a single storm, according to the National Weather Service.
Illinois surpassed 100 tornadoes in a year two other times this century, in 2003 and 2006. The state has averaged around 40 tornadoes a year since record keeping began in 1950.
Some may want to blame climate change, but grounds for the recent rise have largely been rooted in better technology to track and categorize storms, says Walker Ashley, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University.
‘It’s just a different world now’
A mixture of factors have contributed to improved tornado reporting.
It includes the explosion of social media, but it’s primarily due to radar enhancements that allow meteorologists to detect smaller, short-lived tornadoes that are often categorized as EF0 or EF1 on the five-category Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornadoes by wind speed.
“Those tornadoes have always been out there probably, they just were going unreported or they could have been misprescribed,” Ashley said. “They could have been in the past considered damaging wind when in reality they were tornadoes.”
The evolution of Doppler radar has given scientists more tools to detect rotations earlier and track twisters along their paths.
Dual polarization radar was a key advancement in meteorology when it became widely available to forecasters in 2013. The advent transformed radars to emit radiation in horizontal and vertical beams (instead of only horizontal), giving a closer look at storms that allow for easier confirmation of a tornado, experts say.
“The dual polarization allows us to actually see debris being lofted into the air by a tornado, which was something we couldn’t see 10 or 15 years ago,” said Gino Izzi, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
The quick recognition and real-time tracking enable weather service meteorologists to know exactly where to find the tornadoes on the ground and when to interact with residents on social media to field damage reports.
“We all have cell phones and communication devices, so everybody can take a picture. There’s more evidence of these events,” Ashley said. “It’s just a different world now than it was 15, 20, 30 years ago.”
Satellites with improved resolution also equip the National Weather Service to find tornado paths easier in the days following a storm. That can lead to a given storm’s tornado count to go up days or even weeks later.
Crews survey areas that sustain significant damage to determine if it was caused by a tornado or straight line winds.
“They’ll look at whatever type of damage exists to determine whether it was all blown in the same direction, and that would indicate straight line winds, or whether there’s a path,” National Weather Service meteorologist Casey Sullivan said.
An obvious sign of a tornado would be a path of intense damage, then little to no damage on both sides of the path, Sullivan said. Officials also consider the type of damage when determining if a tornado touched down, such as whether it’s just tree damage or if there’s damage to buildings, trucks, trains or any other structures, indicating more powerful winds.
A shift in Tornado Alley?
Janie and John DeVore also have a sense that Tornado Alley, historically seen as encompassing the Great Plains, has shifted in recent years toward the Midwest.
Their opinion holds up in many studies, but the sheer enhancement of technology again helps frame that perception. Climate change, however, still doesn’t get an entirely free pass.
“Because of the warming climate … there will continue to be a gradual shift in the location of Tornado Alley farther east, but how much of it has taken place so far, I don’t know,” Izzi said.
Some experts argue Tornado Alley is a misnomer because the Midwest already has had a similar amount, if not more, tornadoes than the Great Plains.
But, experts say, Tornado Alley likely gets its name because the tornadoes there tend to be more powerful than those in the Midwest, as the type of storms that produce twisters differ in the two regions.
Supercell storms, the most intense thunderstorms, arise more in the Tornado Alley area and usually cause more damage. In the Midwest, squall line storms create the majority of tornadoes, which are less severe and shorter lived.
“Because of the explosion in the number of EF0 and EF1 tornadoes associated with squall lines, the epicenter of where the greatest number of tornadoes occur is likely shifting farther east,” Izzi said.
A warming climate also will produce environments that are more favorable for tornadoes and severe weather, Izzi said.
Despite those indications, it’s not realistic to conclude that any recent tornadoes were caused by climate change.
“It’s tough to say with any degree of certainty how much of any change from year to year is a direct result of climate change and how much of it is a direct result of interyear variability,” Izzi said.
Climate change conundrum
Hume, 69, could be convinced that a warmer climate has already made an impact.
“There’s a lot more [tornadoes] now, I think. It just gets so hot and humid, and then you get a cold front in and you’re asking for a storm,” said Hume, who also last month was stuck on Interstate 55 immediately after the July 15 record-breaking storm.
She waited out the storm before leaving to pick up her son from work, but vehicles became tangled in power lines after the storm downed transmission towers. Hume wound up being stuck on I-55 at the Arsenal Road exit in Channahon for three and a half hours.
That day’s storm, which came a day after another nine tornadoes touched down in the region for a total of 40 twisters in two days, renewed a concept scientists are also pondering: the idea that climate change contributes to more tornadoes happening in bunches.
But even that belief could be rejected by better reporting, Ashley said.
“It’s sort of a conundrum,” Ashley said, because with better reporting comes more tornadoes with every storm, leading to the thought that many twisters come in bundles.
“The answer’s still out there; we don’t know, but there is evidence to suggest that there’s been maybe a slight reduction in the number of tornado days, but when tornadoes do occur, they tend to occur with more frequency,” Ashley said.
Whether tornadoes have actually increased in recent years remains unanswered, and probably will for at least another decade or so. But Ashley said the focus should not always be on the number of tornadoes reported, rather the severity of storms.
“What is really, really important to society is the footprint of tornadoes, so the length times the width,” Ashley said. “We need to do a better job of maybe assessing that rather than the points or touchdowns.”