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Climate change could be driving record-breaking December temperatures, storms across Wisconsin

Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.

“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”

Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.

“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”