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Multi-timescale exploration of teleconnection/tornado activity relationships in the Southeastern United States

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Abstract

Teleconnections like the El Niño/Southern Oscillation affect climate and weather conditions across the globe, including conditions that modulate tornado activity. Early studies of teleconnection/tornado activity relationships provided evidence of links between one teleconnection and tornado activity. Later attempts introduced multivariate approaches by analyzing bivariate distributions and integrating multiple teleconnections in statistical models to predict variability in tornado activity. However, little attention has been given to teleconnection interactions and the role of these interactions in modulating tornado activity. Here, we employ a data-driven, multiple logistic regression modelling approach to explore the interactions between the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Artic Oscillation, and Pacific North American pattern and their ability to predict the odds of an active tornado period in the southeastern United States. We develop models at the annual, seasonal, and monthly scales and, in doing so, illustrate that the teleconnections and teleconnection interactions that best predict the odds of an active tornado period differ across timescales and that the relationships exhibit clear seasonality. We also show climate conditions associated with select interactions, like the ENSO-NAO interaction in spring, that help explain the elevated tornado activity, namely anomalously high near-surface air temperature and humidity steered by an anomalously strong subtropical high.

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Data availability

Tornado data are obtained from https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/. Teleconnection data are obtained from https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Nino34/ and https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/teleconnections.shtml. Atmospheric composite plots were obtained from https://psl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/composites/plot20thc.v2.pl. Datasets generated from these datasources are available upon request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

Support for the 20th Century Reanalysis Project version 3 dataset is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER), by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office, and by the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory Physical Sciences Laboratory.

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No funding was received by any author for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences, Fort Hays State University, Hays, KS, USA

    Todd W. Moore

  2. Anniston, AL, USA

    Tiffany A. DeBoer

  3. School of Sciences, University of Louisiana Monroe, Monroe, LA, USA

    Tyler Fricker

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  1. Todd W. Moore
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Contributions

T.W.M, T.A.D, and T.F. conceived of the study and study design. T.W.M and T.A.D performed statistical analysis and generated figures and tables. T.W.M, T.A.D, and T.F reviewed and wrote portions of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Todd W. Moore.

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Moore, T.W., DeBoer, T.A. & Fricker, T. Multi-timescale exploration of teleconnection/tornado activity relationships in the Southeastern United States. Theor Appl Climatol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-024-04960-4

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