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Severe Weather 2025

I saw a tweet that Broyles’ Omega formula actually had 3/14 as a higher confidence high risk verifier than 3/15. Which isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. That huge and mean looking zonal longwave trough and SLP on 3/14 was the kind of Synoptic set up that have produced our higher end outbreaks throughout history.

The 3/14 ejection wasn’t timed perfectly and the main event got underway well after sunset. Then you add instability limitations with it occurring in mid-March, coupled with the lead wave a few days prior acting more to push the moisture southwards rather than acting as a true primer. Regardless of all that, you still had an upper echelon parameter environment and a very cooperative discrete storm mode in Arkansas and southern Missouri.

Our historical Super outbreaks had a way of maximizing and hitting the synoptic, mesoscale, and storm scale ceilings in harmony. Not to mention easily pushing aside any sort of limiting factors. However, I truly believe if you were to follow the forecasting, modeling, discussion, and lead up to a super outbreak, it would look like the days leading up to 3/14-3/15. Which shows why those events are so rare.
 
ColdFront said:
I saw a tweet that Broyles’ Omega formula actually had 3/14 as a higher confidence high risk verifier than 3/15. Which isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. That huge and mean looking zonal longwave trough and SLP on 3/14 was the kind of Synoptic set up that have produced our higher end outbreaks throughout history.

The 3/14 ejection wasn’t timed perfectly and the main event got underway well after sunset. Then you add instability limitations with it occurring in mid-March, coupled with the lead wave a few days prior acting more to push the moisture southwards rather than acting as a true primer. Regardless of all that, you still had an upper echelon parameter environment and a very cooperative discrete storm mode in Arkansas and southern Missouri.

Our historical Super outbreaks had a way of maximizing and hitting the synoptic, mesoscale, and storm scale ceilings in harmony. Not to mention easily pushing aside any sort of limiting factors. However, I truly believe if you were to follow the forecasting, modeling, discussion, and lead up to a super outbreak, it would look like the days leading up to 3/14-3/15. Which shows why those events are so rare.
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I've mentioned before on this site how the Earth's atmosphere is dynamic to the point of chaotic. This means that getting things into sufficient place to create a substantial weather event tends to essentially come down to random chance, which explains why you get a sort of "power scale"-type probability setup wherein the relatively less substantial events end up being more common, while the relatively more substantial events end up being less common. Needless to say, it's no wonder that the time interval between two super-level outbreaks could stretch for decades or more at a time (and it's just as well--could you imagine, say, having to deal with a super outbreak at least once a year for many years on end?:eek:).
 
Something else I noticed about how high the ceilings were for both 3/14 & 3/15 was Spann’s messaging on his daily weather extreme videos.

Spann has done a really terrific job of communicating to his audience the rarity of 4/27/11 caliber events. Usually before any event he reiterates to the audience that “x event isn’t even close to being forecasted as a 4/27/11 type event.”

Around his 3/13 and 3/14 daily videos, I noticed he didn’t do that for 3/15.
 
Tennie said:
(and it's just as well--could you imagine, say, having to deal with a super outbreak at least once a year for many years on end?).
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Going to go on a bit of a rant here because I love this topic and I feel like talking about it, lol. I wouldn't know what other thread to put this convo in.

A bit of a warning: A lot of what I'm about to say could potentially fuel weenie-like forecasting behavior. I promise this isn't that and there's at least something I can point to to defend it (statistical mechanics) If anyone notices that I've misrepresented something somehow, please let me know.

Statistically speaking, throughout all of Earth's entire geologic history (referring to times where the Earth's temperature, geological background, and atmospheric composition were drastically different than they were today, which includes times and areas on Earth where favorable tornado environments were more/less common) there has certainly been years, maybe even years that include human history, that contained multiple super outbreaks as we would define them today. Based on what we currently understand, the Earth has been around for a little over 4.5 billion years. This next part is practically pure conjecture by me, my numbers could be incorrect, but the idea still stands. I'm guessing significant severe weather would have been possible from the moment the jet streams became well-established (and hell, maybe even before that), which I'm guessing is whenever the Earth's surface cooled to an acceptable temperature difference between the poles and the equator for their formation, such that the resultant pressure differentials in the atmosphere would be satisfied with the movement of wind. From what I understand, this occurred for, at least the first time, close to ~4.2 billion years ago (before the late heavy bombardment) and would have definitely been well-established by the time the late heavy bombardment ended. Even if the jet streams didn't get well-established for billions of years for whatever reason (which is highly unlikely to me) then we would still have hundreds of millions of years at the very least of possible significant severe weather occurring at any given time.

The outbreaks I would consider "super" that are somewhat documented would be 1884, 1896, and 1932 (I could be forgetting a few). 1965, 1974, and 2011 were the other "super" outbreaks that I would consider to be well-documented. On average, these events occur about once every ~26 years if we refer to the years I presented here, so we should expect another super outbreak to happen sometime around 2037 if we're going purely statistically. So we can call these super outbreaks, all of which are quite comparable to one another, a 1-in-25 year event, roughly speaking. What about 1-in-1000 year tornado events? Or, what about a 1-in-100 000 year tornado event? At this point, the atmosphere is not marginally changing in its characteristics anymore, so now you've got to take that into account if you're going to try to define something like that.

But, the point still stands: We've been accurately documenting these things for only about ~60 years, and getting some semblance of documentation for at least 400 years. That is an infinitesimal blip compared to the history of the Earth. The most extreme events you can get here are likely much more intense events than even 2011 could have fostered. There's also likely been times where a "tornado alley" didn't exist on Earth for an appreciable time period, or times on Earth where there was a "tornado alley" that dwarfed ours today. We simply don't know, but statistically speaking, I believe these ideas are quite plausible.

We discuss the 2011 super outbreak as "everything coming together in perfect harmony," which is pretty much true. But what about events where every parameter and possibility for a super outbreak comes into harmony better than 2011 did? To say that such an event never existed would be almost laughably wrong to me. I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical trough ejection that is geometrically more favorable, with an even wider warm sector and more extreme kinematics, with favorable parameters moving with the storms and timed similarly with peak daytime heating. If it's remotely realistic and/or possible, it has likely occurred or come very close to actually occurring.

For example: Imagine a slightly more geometrically favorable 4/3/74 trough swinging through the same areas with better thermos, like it coming through at the beginning of May rather than the beginning of April. Or, better yet, what if there was an extremely unseasonable example of a mega-trough occurring in June-July and swinging through the US with summer-like CAPE values overspreading 4/27/2011 like kinematics over an even wider area than the original 4/3/74 outbreak? We cannot say such a thing is impossible, the Earth's atmosphere is extremely chaotic and things like this can and will eventually occur over an infinite time period. Billions of years is definitely long enough for such a thing to end up happening at least once, I believe. Such an extreme event would dwarf the magnitude of 4/27/2011 and maybe is genuinely impossible, but we cannot say that for certain, not yet.
 
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Not exactly severe weather, but I was biking on the black Creek trail in fultondale Alabama just a bit ago. And managed to snag these storm pictures while racing back to my car 20-30 minutes away lol.
(I beat the storms btw, neither me or my bike got a single rain drop.)

IMG20250713132612.jpgIMG20250713132312.jpgIMG20250713132310.jpg
 
Central Ohio Wx said:
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It feels a bit like seeing something you're just not meant to see. Something absolutely other-worldly (yet inherently Terrestrial) about a true, mesocyclonically-driven tornado enshrouded by fire. I remember when the phenomenon had an almost mythical aura about it, when the only footage of its incidence was from the '03 Canberra fires. Still feels equally hard to fathom. That vortex on the right side of the main funnel is ghastly, and certainly makes me wonder what wind speeds these things are capable of.
 
Sharpy said:
Waiting for some people to inevitably start saying that Spring 2026 will be like Spring 2011, like they do every other year or so
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So this got quite a few replies and a lot of reactions (thank you!). Glad that there’s been good dialogue surrounding the season and how it turned out.

I think everyone got the general point, but it was made to be a joke (that’s just how I roll, obviously when it’s very serious, I’m all in). I know I don’t chime in often, but I feel compelled to expand a bit.

I struggle with storm anxiety at times and I’m better at it now than I have been in a long time, especially with having a wife and two kids. As a junior in high school in 2011, 4/27/2011 is patched in my memory like many others and I thankfully wasn’t impacted physically by it (no storm damage). But I’ll always remember how that spring was (mainly April 2011).

So did this past season catch my attention when the background pattern was mentioned? Absolutely. But I work in healthcare, and one rule with epidemiology when I studied it as part of my Masters, just because there is a correlation ≠ causation. The same can be said for looking back at 2025 and 2011 with their background states. We had a lot of tornadoes this spring, like 2011; however, we did not have a tornado event produce a 4/27/2011-like generational outbreak (going by what James Spann defines one as).

It seems like to me there’s a very small amount of people that seem to think every year has some similarity to 2011 and when they hear 2011, they immediately jump to thinking “we’re going to get another 4/27/2011 this season”. 3/14-3/15, while just goes to show how hard it is to reach that level.
 
slenker said:
Going to go on a bit of a rant here because I love this topic and I feel like talking about it, lol. I wouldn't know what other thread to put this convo in.

A bit of a warning: A lot of what I'm about to say could potentially fuel weenie-like forecasting behavior. I promise this isn't that and there's at least something I can point to to defend it (statistical mechanics) If anyone notices that I've misrepresented something somehow, please let me know.

Statistically speaking, throughout all of Earth's entire geologic history (referring to times where the Earth's temperature, geological background, and atmospheric composition were drastically different than they were today, which includes times and areas on Earth where favorable tornado environments were more/less common) there has certainly been years, maybe even years that include human history, that contained multiple super outbreaks as we would define them today. Based on what we currently understand, the Earth has been around for a little over 4.5 billion years. This next part is practically pure conjecture by me, my numbers could be incorrect, but the idea still stands. I'm guessing significant severe weather would have been possible from the moment the jet streams became well-established (and hell, maybe even before that), which I'm guessing is whenever the Earth's surface cooled to an acceptable temperature difference between the poles and the equator for their formation, such that the resultant pressure differentials in the atmosphere would be satisfied with the movement of wind. From what I understand, this occurred for, at least the first time, close to ~4.2 billion years ago (before the late heavy bombardment) and would have definitely been well-established by the time the late heavy bombardment ended. Even if the jet streams didn't get well-established for billions of years for whatever reason (which is highly unlikely to me) then we would still have hundreds of millions of years at the very least of possible significant severe weather occurring at any given time.

The outbreaks I would consider "super" that are somewhat documented would be 1884, 1896, and 1932 (I could be forgetting a few). 1965, 1974, and 2011 were the other "super" outbreaks that I would consider to be well-documented. On average, these events occur about once every ~26 years if we refer to the years I presented here, so we should expect another super outbreak to happen sometime around 2037 if we're going purely statistically. So we can call these super outbreaks, all of which are quite comparable to one another, a 1-in-25 year event, roughly speaking. What about 1-in-1000 year tornado events? Or, what about a 1-in-100 000 year tornado event? At this point, the atmosphere is not marginally changing in its characteristics anymore, so now you've got to take that into account if you're going to try to define something like that.

But, the point still stands: We've been accurately documenting these things for only about ~60 years, and getting some semblance of documentation for at least 400 years. That is an infinitesimal blip compared to the history of the Earth. The most extreme events you can get here are likely much more intense events than even 2011 could have fostered. There's also likely been times where a "tornado alley" didn't exist on Earth for an appreciable time period, or times on Earth where there was a "tornado alley" that dwarfed ours today. We simply don't know, but statistically speaking, I believe these ideas are quite plausible.

We discuss the 2011 super outbreak as "everything coming together in perfect harmony," which is pretty much true. But what about events where every parameter and possibility for a super outbreak comes into harmony better than 2011 did? To say that such an event never existed would be almost laughably wrong to me. I'm sure you could come up with a hypothetical trough ejection that is geometrically more favorable, with an even wider warm sector and more extreme kinematics, with favorable parameters moving with the storms and timed similarly with peak daytime heating. If it's remotely realistic and/or possible, it has likely occurred or come very close to actually occurring.

For example: Imagine a slightly more geometrically favorable 4/3/74 trough swinging through the same areas with better thermos, like it coming through at the beginning of May rather than the beginning of April. Or, better yet, what if there was an extremely unseasonable example of a mega-trough occurring in June-July and swinging through the US with summer-like CAPE values overspreading 4/27/2011 like kinematics over an even wider area than the original 4/3/74 outbreak? We cannot say such a thing is impossible, the Earth's atmosphere is extremely chaotic and things like this can and will eventually occur over an infinite time period. Billions of years is definitely long enough for such a thing to end up happening at least once, I believe. Such an extreme event would dwarf the magnitude of 4/27/2011 and maybe is genuinely impossible, but we cannot say that for certain, not yet.
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I've actually had thoughts along these lines, but haven't had the time recently to put them together into as coherent a post as you have here. So thanks for sharing that!
 
Tennie said:
I've actually had thoughts along these lines, but haven't had the time recently to put them together into as coherent a post as you have here. So thanks for sharing that!
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I hate to add one more data point (but that is what I do for a living) - perhaps an algorithm that takes these parameters into account and generates an index of sorts for quantitative analysis. Something like this may already exist, but that would be a way to make a more granular comparison.
 
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