{"id":1267,"date":"2024-02-12T17:08:38","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T17:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/?p=1267"},"modified":"2024-02-12T17:09:04","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T17:09:04","slug":"wisconsins-first-recorded-february-tornado-hits-south-of-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wisconsins-first-recorded-february-tornado-hits-south-of-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisconsin\u2019s first recorded February tornado hits south of capital"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A rare winter tornado churned through southern Wisconsin on Thursday, snapping power poles, downing large trees and damaging homes.<\/p>\n

It was the state\u2019s first recorded tornado in the month of February, according to Taylor Patterson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Milwaukee. Records date back to 1948.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is a very unusual time of year for Wisconsin to be getting tornadoes,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cWe were also unusually warm yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several thunderstorms also traveled across Iowa and Illinois on Thursday, dropping hailstones that ranged from the size of peas to the size of ping pong balls. A tornado developed in northern Illinois during this extreme weather event, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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High temperatures were about 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual on Thursday in parts of Wisconsin. More research would be needed to connect this rare, winter tornado to climate change, but scientists expect warmer temperatures, more frequent severe weather and more intense severe weather as a result of carbon pollution raising global temperatures.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no clear way to say if climate change contributed, but that\u2019s something we would have to do more research on,\u201d Patterson.<\/p>\n

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Temperatures were so warm on Thursday that they touched or broke records from 1925. The mercury topped out at 59 degrees F in Madison and 59 in Milwaukee.<\/p>\n

A strong El Ni\u00f1o pattern is likely contributing to chart-topping temperatures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhen there\u2019s a strong El Ni\u00f1o signal, we are warmer than normal, which we have seen throughout this winter,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cWe have broken multiple high temperature records and high minimum temperatures as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patterson said there were damage reports in Evansville, Edgerton and Albany, which are rural communities south of Madison.<\/p>\n

No major injuries were reported, Patterson said.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t immediately clear if all the damage was from a single tornado or if multiple twisters had struck in Wisconsin. Patterson said National Weather Service crews visited damage sites on Friday to assess and classify the strength of the tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.<\/p>\n

“The tornado track near Evansville to SW Jefferson Co is a high end EF2,” the weather service said in an X post Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n

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Scott Lindstrom, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, said it was the strongest tornado in Wisconsin since August 2021 and that it had a relatively long track.<\/p>\n

Lindstrom said the event was unusual because a clear sky preceded the twister, which developed just after sundown.<\/p>\n

Wisconsin has seen winter tornadoes before,\u00a0including three in January.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Matt Artis, 34, surveys the wreckage on Friday after a tornado struck his farm in the Town of Porter, Wis., on Thursday evening.<\/span>Todd Richmond \/ AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Warming temperatures are shifting the risk of supercell thunderstorms, tornadoes and the timing of these events, and\u00a0scientists are trying to understand how that will play out. A\u00a0study published last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society\u00a0found that the risk of supercell storms would increase as global temperatures warmed. These storms would likely become more numerous in the eastern United States, but decrease in the Great Plains.<\/p>\n

The study said the incidence of supercell storms \u201cand their perils\u201d would likely increase in late winter and early spring but decrease in late summer and fall as climate change advances.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese results suggest the potential for more significant tornadoes, hail, and extreme rainfall that, when combined with an increasingly vulnerable society, may produce disastrous consequences,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n

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A rare winter tornado churned through southern Wisconsin on Thursday, snapping power poles, downing large trees and damaging homes. It was the state\u2019s first recorded tornado in the month of February, according to Taylor Patterson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Milwaukee. Records date back to 1948. \u201cThis is a very unusual time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1270,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/1270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}