“We look for moisture, we look for lift — lifting of air into the atmosphere and this turning of the winds with height — we got all that going together, and it was just perfect,’’ said Eleanor Vallier-Talbot, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Taunton. “Everything just lined up.’’
The last tornado to hit Massachusetts occurred in July 2008, a waterspout tornado that started in Narragansett Bay and struck parts of Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts. A destructive tornado occurred in 1995 in Great Barrington, killing several people. In 1953, Worcester weathered a major tornado that caused massive destruction and killed more than 90 people, one of the deadliest in the US.
In general, said Jerry Brotzge, senior research scientist at the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma, the Plains are prone to tornadoes because warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico mixes with cool, dry winds blowing off the Rocky Mountains.
“Whereas in the Northeast, our winds are almost generally from the west or southwest through the whole atmosphere — it’s a lot more difficult to get wind shear and strong updrafts,’’ Brotzge said.
Meteorologists said that although there is heightened awareness of tornadoes because of the storms in the South and Midwest this spring, there is no connection between those and the storm system that came through Massachusetts.
“It’s just bad luck this year. There’s no link we have between global warming, global climate change, and increased frequency of tornado,’’ said Josh Wurman, president of the Center for Severe Weather Research, a nonprofit research organization in Boulder, Colo., that receives funding from the National Science Foundation and has been working on understanding why many thunderstorms that are capable of causing tornadoes don’t — to enable better prediction.
