SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Dozens of tornadoes ripped across Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton yesterday. They added to the damage done by the powerful hurricane. Now, Milton itself was almost certainly intensified by human-driven climate change, but the tornadoes are a different story. NPR's Alejandra Borunda from the climate desk joins us now to explain. Hey there.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: So, I mean, tornadoes alongside hurricanes - this was a lot. What was going on here?
BORUNDA: Yeah, it's a lot. So not only were Floridians trying to get ready for this incredibly powerful hurricane. The weather conditions were just right for some very intense tornadoes to form. Victor Gensini is a tornado and extreme weather expert at Northern Illinois University, and he says it was remarkable.
VICTOR GENSINI: I can pretty confidently say that yesterday was one of the most prolific and meteorologically impressive tornado outbreaks in Florida associated with a landfalling hurricane - in fact, maybe any landfalling hurricane anywhere.
BORUNDA: Yeah. The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center sent out more than a hundred warnings. And not just for these, like, weak, short-lived little twisters, but big, intense ones, like what you'd expect in the Great Plains, not in Florida.
DETROW: A lot of people were talking about this. A lot of people seemed really surprised by this. But I'm wondering this -were scientists, were experts surprised by this?
BORUNDA: Yeah. That's a good question - and honestly, not really. It's very well-known that hurricanes can spawn tornadoes. Earlier this year, even, Hurricane Beryl had almost 70 associated with it. And in the past, there's been storms that have had more than a hundred. But tornadoes definitely don't happen all the time. Like, Helene didn't really have this problem. And that's because tornadoes need really specific weather ingredients to form.
JANA HOUSER: The bigger the hurricane is, generally, the more likely it is to potentially produce tornadoes.
BORUNDA: That's Jana Houser. She's a tornado expert at the Ohio State University. And obviously, Milton was big. But there was also this other cold weather system right next to it from the jet stream. And that weather system added winds higher up in the atmosphere and cold air that drove some atmospheric instability. And when you put all of those ingredients together, you can get these pockets of spinning winds called super cells. And Gensini says those can turn into tornadoes.
GENSINI: The hurricane was like the match that lit the fire.
DETROW: So a lot of the conversation over the last few weeks has been how human-caused climate change is making hurricanes more severe. What about tornadoes, though? Does climate change make them more likely or stronger?
BORUNDA: You know, I'm a climate reporter, and usually the answer to a question like this is, yeah, probably.
DETROW: Yeah.
BORUNDA: But here, actually, the answer is different. Here's Houser again.
HOUSER: It's very difficult to make a direct correlation between tornadoes and climate change. We don't know all of those nuances between why one storm will produce a tornado and why another one doesn't.
BORUNDA: So, honestly, the answer is probably somewhere between probably not and we don't know. But for right now, scientists just can't say whether climate change is affecting tornadoes, either the ones like here in Florida or what we typically see in Tornado Alley. But they're definitely working on it. And what they can say is that, just like you said, climate change almost certainly made Milton more intense. And that's because the place the storm gets its energy from is the Gulf of Mexico, and the gulf is way hotter than normal this year. And that's because of human-caused climate change.
DETROW: Yeah. So bottom line, though, is it seems like we just don't know whether we should expect more tornadoes to come with hurricanes in the future, right? It's the specific conditions.
BORUNDA: Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of people felt really shocked by these, but I don't think scientists know what the future holds yet. I do think it's really important to recognize that forecasters saw these particular tornados coming pretty well in advance, at least relatively. They were sending out warnings as much as a day ahead of time, which in tornado speak is, like, forever.
DETROW: Right. NPR's Alejandra Borunda. Thank you so much.
BORUNDA: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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