Ramblings of a Graduate Student

VORTEX II was once again forced to call a down day because the atmosphere just wasn’t willing to cooperate. Fortunately for the crew, tomorrow appears to hold more promise for thunderstorms in their general area.

So, with all these down days recently, I wondered how the 2010 tornado season has compared to the tornado seasons of years past. I’ve previously mentioned that 2010 has been a below normal year for tornadoes through the first three months of the year. Now that another (almost) 2 months have passed, and VORTEX II has begun, where do things stand now?

In the image above (which I’ve described previously here), the average over the last five years is marked in grey, and actual events for this year are plotted in red. As you can see, we are still nearly 200 tornadoes below the average over the last five years. This is not a good sign for the VORTEX II crew. Here’s to hoping the next few days and weeks are better for researchers.

With the chance of severe weather returning to the eastern two-thirds of the United States by mid-week, I thought tonight I’d post about this year’s severe weather to date.  If you’ve thought this year has been unusually devoid of severe weather, you’d be correct.

The image above was created by the Storm Prediction Center’s Warning Coordination Meteorologist, Greg Carbin.  It displays the 2010 tornadoes (in red) and 2005-2009 tornado averages in grey.  The vertical bars represent the daily occurrence of tornadoes (2005-2009 in grey; 2010 in red; axis on the left) and the more horizontal bars indicate the running totals (axis on the right).  A quick glance quickly captures how far below recent history we are, with less than 100 preliminary tornado reports through 15 April.  To put it into perspective, the recent average through 15 April is 415!  It isn’t very often that by mid April, January was is one of your bigger tornado producing months!  As we continue to head into peak tornado season, this gap continues to widen for each day that passes without tornado occurrences.

Late this week, the atmosphere may support tornadoes again through portions of the central United States.  I’ll have more on this throughout the week.