Meteorologist Stephen Bennett joined Wake Up With Cheddar to discuss the aftermath of Thursday's major storm, and the impact climate change is having on storm patterns across the U.S.

Wake Up With Cheddar

Tens of Thousands Still Without Power in Tennessee After Winter Storm

So let's bring in meteorologist Stephen Bennett, chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Financial Weather and Climate Risk Steven. Good morning, thanks so much for joining us still about 66,000 people in Tennessee. Still without power four days later. Just how bad was this storm? My goodness. We've had a wave of winter storms that started at the beginning of january and it continued all the way through early february, the one that recently came across the Tennessee valley, the big problem there was ice, so there was snow farther north. But freezing rain is the is the culprit that tends to be the biggest problem on the power grid. And we saw that in upstate new york as well, tens of thousands of people still without power in upstate new york. What does this sort of forecast look like for the rest of the week? Stephen are we expecting a reprieve for a lot of people here things are calming down. So we are we are moving into at least for the next week into a pattern that will feature a lot less winter weather and a lot warmer temperatures, especially across the eastern part of the country and across the southeast and in the west, it looks like there could actually be record warm temperatures coming up later this week. How much of a role is climate change playing in this? Given the fact that we saw about a year ago, the attention that happened in the texas power grid, luckily the situation didn't repeat itself this year, but this seems like this is progressively getting worse every year. One of the interesting things to note is that climate change is certainly playing an impact or having an impact on these storms. The distribution of winter storms are changing and a lot of people tend to equate climate change with global warming and you tend to think that in a warming environment there would be less winter weather overall. But there is some research, some recent research to suggest that climate change may actually be impacting winter storms in a way that they have more precipitation. So we may be seeing less snowfall overall in certain places, but the storms when they do come tend to have higher precipitation with them. So if it falls in the form of snow, we're seeing more big storms, more blizzards and things along those lines. And the other thing to note is that it's highly localized effects of climate change on weather patterns is different in a place like new york than it might be in a place like Dallas or in a place like Seattle. Oh, that's so interesting. So it does this alter a lot of the patterns. Also, climate change alter a lot of the patterns in the locations where a lot of these storms are hitting as a result of this because I found it so interesting that you're seeing ice and rain, but also tornadoes happening in the south as well. And this is february. Yeah, that's right and the tornado outbreaks that we saw back in the, at the end of 2021 back in December were unprecedented in places like Minnesota. The severe weather farther north, deeper in the winter. Um that is almost certainly a result of climate change affecting weather patterns, so that weather patterns we would have seen in the farther south, in december or january are, are occurring a bit farther north. And that's, that was definitely a link. As we saw. The severe weather, you get severe weather in the south in the winter time, but you don't tend to see tornadoes as far north as Minnesota and that's almost certainly due to shifting jet stream pattern in the winter. Meteorologist Stephen Bennett Stephen, such a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much for getting up early with us this morning.