The air in the middle of the country for the last week or so has been, well, juicy. Dew points are in the mid-70s as far north as Fargo, even in the middle of the night. This is very uncomfortable, especially for the Nordic persons in the Upper Midwest, a hearty people known more for their winter resilience. There is a reason for this boost in humidity.

Corn.

Part of the respiration process for plants includes moisture leaving through evaporation. I’m not a biologist, so I won’t labor to explain that part of it to you I will say that the amount of evaporated moisture goes up with the volume of plants. Certain types of plants also produce more moisture.

Broad leafed crops, particularly corn, is an efficient evapotranspirator, and later in the season, when corn is at its heartiest for the season, local moisture climbs. Corn is a cash crop in heartland, and the elevated dew points seem to be most impacted in Iowa and Illinois. As temperatures start to cool ahead of the harvest, the moisture can be so much that it leads to overnight fog until it arms up in the afternoon.

This time of year, though, it ha a destabilizing effect on the atmosphere. When even a weak system moves into such a moisture rich environment, storms erupt with even more rain, and potentially some additional wind and hail, because of the updrafts enhanced by the supersaturated air. Of course, more and heavier rain can only lead to one thing.

More corn.

Through the middle of the year, there is probably not a bigger weather story than the flooding in central Texas, particularly around Kerrville that claimed the lives of over 100 souls, including many at a youth camp along the Guadalupe River. There is a political story out there as well, involving the reduction in force at the National Weather Service, thanks to a drastic reduction in science funding from the administration. It’s easy to draw lines between the two stories, but it isn’t quite as clear as that.

A structural problem with meteorology and forecasting is the ability both to disseminate warnings properly and have potentially affected persons heed those warnings. As has been widely reported, flash flood warnings were issued several hours in advance of the floods, but the warnings came in the middle of the night to a part of the world that receives warnings all the time. Nevertheless, dangerous weather was expected, and meteorologists did what they could to try to get warnings out.

Before I dig into the issues that enhanced the natural disasters tragedy, I do want to reassure anyone who will listen. The post will not be abandoned in times of duress. For example, tonight there is a risk of severe weather in the northern Plains, and offices that may have lost staff, like Aberdeen or Grand Forks will reallocate their resources to ensure that they are fully staffed through the duration of any severe outbreak that goes on. There will be support for other offices in the region. This is meteorologists banding together despite the headwinds against them.

The issue is a longstanding issue particularly with meteorology and broadly with human nature. Models don’t yet have the resolution to go house to house or even neighborhood to neighborhood in our forecasting or even our weather reporting. Remember earlier this month about the tornado striking Victoria, Minnesota? I still have family in town, and they said that nobody in town was talking about it. The twister was only a few hundred feet wide, and left 95% of the town unscathed.

Because of the nature of weather, communication and geography, there isn’t a good way to reduce the area of a warning to specify only those who will definitely be impacted by a weather event. As a result, even when bad weather occurs, most people in an area feel their warning may have been unwarranted, as did nearly all of Victoria, if they looked only at their front yard after an actual tornado passed through their city limits. This leads to a severe “boy who called wolf” attitude about weather warnings across the population.

Improving the definition of models, as well as seeking the best way to disseminate warnings is a joint effort of meteorologists, programmers and social scientists. This is the work that is arrested during the funding freeze from Washington. The immediate warnings may or may not suffer, but they certainly aren’t going to get better.

Additionally, while the reduction of force is a problem in itself, the specific type of person that lost their job exasperates the structural problems in meteorology. Probationary – young – employees were let go across the NWS and NOAA. There is going to be a gap of people who had been in NOAA for a few years, and through the end of this budgetary restriction, with no new blood, no new ideas. The advances will not only cease, but in a few years, that’s when regression really begins. It’s going to be tough to avoid.

It’s probably too soon to say that the tragedy along the Guadalupe River was a direct result of the layoffs at NOAA, but it is quite appropriate to point out that the Administration is in no position to address the shortcomings that magnified this tragedy, and it likely won’t be for a very long time.

It’s a rapidly changing culture out there, and it i leading to a lot of weather related headlines. One thing that we hear about quite a bit is the emergence of AI boosted models and model guidance. In that spirit, I guess there is no surprise that Clime was the forecast winner this month. Of course, they are 5th best of all forecasters for the year, but maybe the tide is turning.

National Weather Service	5.83
Accuweather	5
The Weather Channel	4
Clime	3.5
Weatherbug	3
Victoria-Weather	2.83
WeatherNation	1.83

As noted on Facebook over the weekend, there was a tornado in the namesake town for this site, Victoria, Minnesota. It occurred in the middle of the night Saturday into Sunday morning, which is an incredibly dangerous time to endure severe weather, and the storm did track through a couple of neighborhoods. Fortunately, the damage to structures was minimal, and there were no injuries reported because of the storm.

Contrary to my initial thoughts, seen in the Facebook post, the NWS surveyed two twisters, following a similar path to what was charted above. You can see their official survey, which involved investigators on the ground and drones, on top of the real time evaluation and storm reports that I used.

While the storm did cause tree damage, and some light damage to homes, including where trees fell on them or siding was ripped off, the twisters also spend quite a bit of time in open fields, Carver Park Nature Reserve and especially over Lakes. While the shoreline areas obviously sustained some damage, the fact that the cells passed over, by my count 6 different lakes really limited the human toll storms in a metro area could have taken.

9:42AML It’s been a wild start to spring, and it is going to be wet soon again, but today and tomorrow are mostly going to be recovery days. Flashflood warnings in Ohio will air out. Maybe a few severe storms in the mid-Atlantic, but nothing widespread, and even less tomorrow. Then we’ll start ramping up again. Sorry.

12:11PM – It is not the weekend, and do you know how I know that? Because it is not raining anywhere in the mid-Atlantic or New England (also because I have a calendar). It’s been raining on the weekend for several weeks in a row almost everywhere, and that total is mounting up to months worth of weekends now. It’s probably going to rain again this coming weekend, too.

It wasn’t a busy month for forecasts for us, but there was still plenty to talk about. Tornado season leads to hurricane season, and as a result, there is always a little bit of extra attention on the weather this time of year, so even if we didn’t get a high volume of forecasts, their success was a little bit weightier. The beleaguered National Weather Service did come through with the top forecasts for the month.

Outlet	Forecast Wins (year)
The Weather Channel	4
National Weather Service	4
Accuweather	3.5
Weatherbug	3
Clime	2.5
Victoria-Weather	2.5
WeatherNation	1.5

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.