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Severe Weather 2025

View attachment 39941
Quite a large 5% risk.
Andy Samberg Movie Awards 2016 GIF

5% day in west-central Texas. You all know what that means.
 
Smaller events, which are more of a plains thing in general, are much harder to gauge, though I see complaints about lack of them too. 27/4/24 was nocturnal, like many recent events. Many past plains outbreaks have been diurnal. Historically most touchdowns are between 21Z and 2Z. I've lost count of how many times someone's said 'wait for the low level jet', but producing tornadoes in daylight usen't be a problem.

The other complaint I read (especially from Faidley) is lack of June events. AFAIK June was historically more active than April. While the 5:6 split of April being more active is close, June hasn't passed its 1999-2023 average (191) since 2014, April (190) has five times. The 1989-2013 averages were April-168 : June-234. These tend to be northern or high plains events, often slower moving and easier to chase.

I think I've a seen a paper or two suggesting a decrease in plains activity and increase in the SE, and one suggesting a trend to fewer tornado days (larger outbreaks less often), but the data are messy and the trends small. This isn't that surprising as tornado data aren't good quality until the era of doppler (and chasing becoming popular), making long term trends hard to find.

While rose-tinted glasses are always a factor, I'm not going to dismiss out of hand people saying the past decade or so has been unusually inactive on the plains.
I absolutely agree with you that the past decade has been unusually inactive on the plains. However, as you noted, the data is so messy and we don’t have a good, quality, accurate historical record. My own personal opinion is there does seem to be a cyclical component to the average tornadic activity of areas. Some decades, certain locations are more active than others, with below average totals in other regions. Curious to see what your thoughts are!

The plains discussion does remind me though. We used to have a moronic poster on here who posited that climate change was making tornados both weaker and higher end outbreak days more rare. They somehow used climate change denying “experts” to further their clown show theory. Not even taking into account issues with the EF Scale. So after every event didn’t produce 4 EF5s or wasn’t a carbon copy of 4/27/11 or 4/3/74 they would come trumpet their ridiculous criteria and theory and how it proved they’re correct.

Its probably recency bias, and probably has always been a question for severe weather events, but I’ve noticed storm mode seems to lean more linear vs discrete more times than not the past few years.
 
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A little blip just formed in the desolate wildlands between Fort Stockton and Sanderson, TX, now headed to Iraan. (Iraan so far away...you can see a flock of seagulls on the radar...)

Every storm starts out as a blip
A little bitty blip
Taking moisture from the ground, call it a double dip
But i don't give a flip
Little blips, they can rip
You can feel it in your hip
Never underestimate a blip
 
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