3:51PM: If you are anything like me, you will take advantage of the NWS snowfall probability forecasts in any pending snow fall scenario. Now, the NWS has similar outlooks for rainfall, which is great for farmers and gardeners, and is available here. Update the final three letters of the URL to your NWS office to see a map for where you live.

10:47PM: This spring has remained fairly active. There have certainly been the fair share of severe storms, but also, east of the Rockies has been on the rainy side of average for a lot of places. At least in places like western Nebraska, which has been drier, there is an ongoing forecast for rain for the next couple of days.

The last post here was about the devastating tornadoes in St. Louis and Kentucky in the middle of the month on May 15th. I noted that it wasn’t a classic outbreak. Though there was quite a bit of severe weather, it wasn’t overwhelmed by multiple tornadic supercells. The tornadoes that occurred were devastating, but they weren’t particularly widespread.

In the 11 days, including today, since that terrible day, only one day has had little severe weather, the 21st which saw 20 severe reports (most from western Pennsylvania, where there were some small tornadoes, ironically) versus hundreds of severe reports on all of the other days. What’s more, is that there has been a predilection for storms in the south central US (Texas to Alabama, approximately). There hasn’t really been a let up.

The 17th, 18th and 19th were the busiest of those days, with several hundred reports from storms, including wind, hail and tornadoes. The 17th and 19th also featured a few injuries as the result of stronger storms. The organized severe weather has since started to focus on hail and particularly strong winds in the last few days, and has increasingly targeted the lower Mississippi Valley, as opposed to the High Plains.

This is because of an upper level gyre centered over the Great Lakes that has become disconnected from the main jet stream. Flow through the gyre is allowing for weak shortwaved redevelopment at the surface, moving from the Red River Valley to the Lower Mississippi Valley before dissipating and starting over the next day. This gyre is going to recycle about 4 more times, meaning about 4 more days of severe weather from Texas to the Carolinas. By the weekend, it will fold into the jet structure and start moving east and out of the southern US for the weekend.

The transitional season of spring has allowed this gyre to keep pumping severe weather into the region, because the Gulf keeps supplying fuel to the fire. However with the gyre having a tough time moving, the weather has strafed the same ground over and over, and has robbed it of it’s potency since the clash of air masses has been blunted, and the lines between warm and cold air were increasingly blurred. Still, it has been severe couple of weeks, even if not in the news cycle consuming fashion of a typical spring outbreak.

Tornadoes last weekend, particularly those in St. Louis and London, Kentucky resulted in the largest weather loss of life thus far in the severe weather season. Hearts break for all those affected by these storms, and they are stirring a greater conversation around the country about forecasting and disaster relief, but the storms also point back to something we always need to be reminded of.

The strength and number of tornadoes is less impactful than where the tornadoes strike. While these have been the most deadly days of the 2025 tornado season, they haven’t been the days with the most twisters. Despite the number of deaths and the extensive damage, these storms weren’t the strongest storms. In St. Louis, the tornado was an EF-3, while the one in Kentucky was an EF-4. Strong, certainly, but there have been stronger.

And the mode through which these storms occurred was less of he isolated supercells that we se in he Plains, like we have seen in Moore or Greensburg, but rather embedded within broader storm systems. Supercells, no less, but hardly the classic radar signature. Most importantly, had this storm not hit St. Louis and London, I’m not even sure these storms would necessarily be a “tornado outbreak”.

But of crucial importance was the fact that these storms DID hit St. Louis and London, and will thus be remembered for the destructive incidents that they are. A tornado is a spectacle that people go out of their way to observe until the time it moves through a densely populated city, or a mountain community with an out of service weather radio network. Storms can be strong or numerous, but they don’t really become nightmares until they find humanity.

It’s mid-May, and students are getting ready to finish their school year and start enjoying summer break. It’s shorts and t-shirt time for most of us, and it’s only going to get hotter. For people like me who prefer summer over everything else, this is fantastic news. That means that the out look for late May isn’t fantastic for people such as myself.

Unlike the previous Omega block, we aren’t expecting a static pattern in the upper atmosphere, but rather a repetitive one. There won’t be a standing trough, but one that keeps reappearing over and over again. Regardless of the cause, the result is the same: reinforcement of Canadian air and temperatures that aren’t quite where we expect them to be.

More often than not through the end of the month, there projects to be an upper level trough and more unsettled weather than normal from the Mississippi to the Mid-Atlantic and north through New England. The cooler temperatures beneath the trough, and more pertinently, under clouds and swirling areas of low pressure will mean a late May that isn’t as sweltering as we have grown accustomed to.

We had one other unfortunate reminder today. The was the cooler lobe is sinking into the eastern part of the country, there will be a ring of fire, so to speak, on the periphery, with a severe season lasting later than it normally does into late May. It doesn’t look particularly wet, but I expect it to be fairly stormy.

It is in the 90s across most of North Dakota today. Within the next hour or so, I would venture to guess that every reporting site in the state will be at or greater than 90.

That’s hot anywhere, and particularly in mid-May in North Dakota. The thing about North Dakota is that it is higher latitude than almost all of the rest of the contiguous United States, and it falls within the northern High Plains. This leaves the place vulnerable to temperature swings like the one that swung temperatures into the 90s for the early part of the week, but also 50 degrees cooler (for highs!) by the end of the week.

A meandering and fairly useless blob of low pressure in the southeast is going to rob a developing system in the Upper Midwest of a lot of it’s convective oomph, and that’s probably for the best, given the pool of cold air it is going to pull in behind it on Thursday and into Friday.

These are the forecast low temperatures for Friday night into Saturday morning. Make no mistake, after starting the week in the mid 90s, it is completely reasonable to believe there might be some snow in North Dakota and northern Minnesota over the weekend. Fortunately, there won’t be too much in the way of severe weather as this low gets going and the cold winds start blowing.

That’s actually a 60+ degree drop in a few days for parts of North Dakota this week. Can’t they enjoy spring even just for a little bit?