Oklahoma Dust Bowl & Tornadoes

[paigetheoracle]

Was Oklahoma tornado alley before the dust bowl and did it occur only after this / get worse?

[Buffy]

"Tornado Alley" exists because of long term weather patterns that result from it's location: it is a place where cold fronts from the north west collide with warm fronts from the south, something that has gone on at least since the last ice age in North America.

 

The "Dust Bowl" occurred specifically because of the dramatic increase in farming in the midwest during the early 20th century and was a combination of a severe and prolonged drought in combination with the dramatic growth of farms that due to the market fluctuations, left bare ground where prairie grasses that formerly maintained the water table through dry weather used to thrive. State and Federal regulations requiring farmers to maintain their fields and irrigation infrastructure has mostly eliminated this threat even though the conditions for it still exist, and those conditions are getting worse due to Climate Change.

 

So, the bottom line is that the two are pretty much unrelated, other than the fact that the weather patterns did in fact produce tornadoes in the early 1930's that had an awful lot of dust in them.

 

Although there's growing evidence that Climate Change is resulting in more and stronger tornadoes, the damage from them is increasing much faster than that can explain mostly due to the rapid expansion of small towns into big cities in North Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri (the traditional "Tornado Alley," although they are common across the midwest and southeast). The "towns" in Oklahoma that were hit in the last several weeks are actually all suburbs of Oklahoma City that used to be farmland just a couple of decades ago.

 

I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas, :phones:

Buffy