Germany and Tornadoes

Over the past two weeks, if you pay attention to weather in Germany....there's been a couple of tornadoes.  Germans will tell you that they rarely, IF EVER, have such things, and this all the cause of global warming, which can only come from America. Well....they say this but it's mostly leading back to statements by a couple of news media enthusiasts that generate this claim.

If you asked a German to explain the trigger or cause of a tornado....they usually look at you in a daze and can't really explain this in any detail.

In simplistic terms.....tornadoes will from tall cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds.....requiring both a warm front and cold front to converge to some degree.  Fast cold air mixes with warm air from the lower levels.  A swirling action starts up because of the warm and cold air mix.....which is a horizontal type movement.  A funnel starts up in the air, and when it touches the ground.....it's a tornado.

Yeah, it is that simple.

Over the past two weeks.....if you pay attention to regional weather talk (like from HR), they discuss this unique degree of both warm and cold fronts coming across Hessen and southern Germany.  Is a weather front attached to global warming?  The weather guys would tend to laugh over such an observation....mostly because you have hundreds of such fronts that occur over Germany every year.  The same folks will bring up the non-movement of a heat front in 2003, which brought extreme hot weather to France and Germany for almost six weeks.  This was the year where 14,000-odd French folks died from exhaustion (mostly old folks not drinking enough liquids).  Sometimes fronts proceed, and sometimes they stall. It's the nature of a front.

As for the history of tornadoes in Germany?  The first reported tornado on German soil was in Augsburg on 2 July 1587.  Caused by global warming?  No......a cold front and a warm front merged, with swirling action starting up as a horizontal type movement.

If you cross out borders.....you tend to see several tornadoes each year throughout all of Europe.  Rarely do German news media folks bring this fact up because they'd like to focus strictly on Germany and pretend it's an occurrence related to global warming (there are dozens of tornadoes reported throughout Europe in the 1700s).

As for limited damage?  That's a curious thing which an American would note while viewing the video to these reports.  Germans build houses with concrete and brick, and they are rock-solid.  So, what you see as damage is typically a roof removed but the bulk of the house standing there. Trees get uprooted but it's not the same type of damage as you'd see in the US.  German roofers will get to work and a month later.....have an entire neighborhood back to almost normal.

So, yeah.....there's been more than the average number of cold and warm fronts mixing in 2015 so far than normal.  And it's a curious thing to note the occurrence level rising.  But no, it's not global warming at work on this episode.  Save the slant for the right occasion.