Photo: The Canadian Press

FILE – A lady is carried out of a hearth station to an ambulance after a twister tore by means of west Little Rock, Ark., March 31, 2023. (Staci Vandagriff/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette through AP, File)

The United States is Earth’s punching bag for nasty climate.

Blame geography for the U.S. getting hit by stronger, costlier, extra various and frequent excessive climate than wherever on the planet, a number of consultants mentioned. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, jutting peninsulas like Florida, clashing storm fronts and the jet stream mix to naturally brew the nastiest of climate.

That’s solely a part of it. Nature dealt the United States a nasty hand, however folks have made it a lot worse by what, the place and the way we construct, a number of consultants advised The Associated Press.

Then add climate change, and “buckle up. More extreme events are expected,” mentioned Rick Spinrad, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Flash floods. Droughts. Wildfires. Blizzards. Ice storms. Nor’easters. Lake-effect snow. Heat waves. Severe thunderstorms. Hail. Lightning. Atmospheric rivers. Derechos. Dust storms. Monsoons. Bomb cyclones. And the dreaded polar vortex.

It begins with “where we are on the globe,” North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello mentioned. “It’s truly a little bit … unlucky.”

China might have extra folks, and a big land space just like the United States, however “they don’t have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather,” mentioned Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute on the University of South Carolina.

The U.S. is by far the king of tornadoes and different extreme storms.

“It really starts with kind of two things. Number one is the Gulf of Mexico. And number two is elevated terrain to the west,” mentioned Victor Gensini, a Northern Illinois University meteorology professor.

Look at Friday’s deadly weather, and be careful for the following week to see it in motion: Dry air from the West goes up over the Rockies and crashes into heat, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s all introduced collectively alongside a stormy jet stream.

In the West, it is a drumbeat of atmospheric rivers. In the Atlantic, it is nor’easters within the winter, hurricanes in the summertime and generally a bizarre mixture of each, like Superstorm Sandy.

“It is a reality that regardless of where you are in the country, where you call home, you’ve likely experienced a high-impact weather event firsthand,” Spinrad mentioned.

Killer tornadoes in December 2021 that struck Kentucky illustrated the distinctiveness of the United States.

They hit areas with massive immigrant populations. People who fled Central and South America, Bosnia and Africa have been all victims. An enormous downside was that tornadoes actually did not occur in these folks’s former houses, so that they did not know what to look at for or what to do, and even know they needed to be involved about tornadoes, mentioned Joseph Trujillo Falcon, a NOAA social scientist who investigated the aftermath.

With colder air up within the Arctic and hotter air within the tropics, the realm between them — the mid-latitudes, the place the United States is — will get essentially the most fascinating climate due to how the air acts in clashing temperatures, and that north-south temperature gradient drives the jet stream, mentioned Northern Illinois meteorology professor Walker Ashley.

Then add mountain ranges that go north-south, jutting into the winds flowing from west to east, and beneath it all of the toasty Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf injects scorching, moist air beneath the customarily cooler, dry air lifted by the mountains, “and that doesn’t happen really anywhere else in the world,” Gensini mentioned.

If the United States as an entire has it unhealthy, the South has it the worst, mentioned University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

“We drew the short straw (in the South) that we literally can experience every single type of extreme weather event,” Shepherd mentioned. “Including blizzards. Including wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes. Every single type. … There’s no other place in the United States that can say that.”

Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana additionally stick out within the water so are extra liable to being hit by hurricanes, mentioned Shepherd and Dello.

The South has extra manufactured housing that’s susceptible to all kinds of climate hazards, and storms usually tend to occur there at night time, Ashley mentioned. Night storms are lethal as a result of folks cannot see them and are much less prone to take cowl, and so they miss warnings of their sleep.

The excessive climate triggered by America’s distinctive geography creates hazards. But it takes people to show these hazards into disasters, Ashley and Gensini mentioned.

Just look the place cities pop up in America and the remainder of the world: close to water that floods, besides possibly Denver, mentioned South Carolina’s Cutter. More individuals are transferring to areas, such because the South, the place there are extra hazards.

“One of the ways in which you can make your communities more resilient is to not develop them in the most hazard-prone way or in the most hazard-prone portion of the community,” Cutter mentioned. “The insistence on building up barrier islands and development on barrier islands, particularly on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, knowing that that sand is going to move and having hurricanes hit with some frequency … seems like a colossal waste of money.”

Construction requirements are usually on the naked minimal and fewer prone to survive the storms, Ashley mentioned.

“Our infrastructure is crumbling and nowhere near being climate-resilient at all,” Shepherd mentioned.

Poverty makes it arduous to organize for and bounce again from disasters, particularly within the South, Shepherd mentioned. That vulnerability is a good greater situation in other places in the world.

“Safety can be bought,” Ashley said. “Those that are well-to-do and who have resources can buy safety and will be the most resilient when disaster strikes. … Unfortunately that isn’t all of us.”

“It’s sad that we have to live these crushing losses,” mentioned Kim Cobb, a Brown University professor of setting and society. “We’re worsening our hand by not understanding the landscape of vulnerability given the geographic hand we’ve been dealt.”