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.

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?

The month of April was dynamic in a way that May hasn’t been. I’ve often said that when the weather gets wilder, The Weather Channel gets better. This thing that I say so often and everyone has heard me say bore fruit again, as they had tie for the top forecast in the month of April. I guess I need to have a similar expression for WeatherNation, who joined TWC at the top of the charts.

Outlet	Forecast Wins (year)
The Weather Channel	4
Accuweather	3.5
National Weather Service	3.5
Weatherbug	3
Clime	2.5
Victoria-Weather	1.5
WeatherNation	1

There sure aren’t a lot of destinations between Denver and Killeen, but it is a thirteen hour drive, which means we will take a break after the first 8 hours. It’s an 882 hour difference between the two towns, which we will cover at a pace of 65.3mph on the highways through the high plains. At that pace, we will surpass 522 miles before we stop for the night.

DAY ONE (Monday)

Low pressure over the 4 Corners is spiraling away in the base of the left lobe of our Omega blocking pattern, which means persistent rain and storms in the Rockies, and some scattered but unimpressive shower activity on the eastern slope of the Rockies. Unfortunately, that will be exactly where we are driving. Expect it to be wet from eastern Colorado to the Texas Panhandle at times, but with cloudy conditions throughout. Fortunately, this part of the world, and the type of system churning away won’t yet be conducive for really nasty weather. We will stop near New Deal, Texas, which is just north of Lubbock.

DAY TWO (Tuesday)

The feature will emerge from the Rockies overnight and into the morning on Tuesday. The weather position over the Gulf and in the lee of the Rockies will mean more assertive thunderstorm activity through central Texas, but it will be shifting out of our route by mid afternoon. It may even be crisp with quite a bit of sun as we head from the flat, agrarian Lubbock, to the flat, military Killeen.

The number of tornadoes reported in the United States has risen dramatically in the last couple of decades, and there is a pretty good reason for that. Radars are better, there are storm chasers everywhere for nearly every storm, and as a result, we are detecting them with much greater frequency. They’ve always been out there, but now we are able to identify them.

This is the same as many ailments. We may not have been able to identify them in the past, but now that we can, the reported cases have gone up. We used to have a lot of cases of consumption, and then tuberculosis was identified, and what we knew as consumption actually was related to many other symptoms, so consumption, now known as TB saw case numbers rose.

The analogy is a little bit different to what is going on this year, but more or less the same. There is a lot of forecast lead time for storms this year. Either because the storms this year are a little bit stronger, or models are better, or there is a change in philosophy, but there has been a greater willingness by the Storm Prediction Center to put greater risk in outlooks further out in days four and beyond. It used to be that any outlook beyond two days with a slight risk was remarkable, and now we regularly see it in the extended outlook.

This has been a gradual trend that is quite apparent this year. I’d like to have some clarification if there was a change in philosophy or just the natural evolution of confidence in forecast guidance, but obviously, there are other things that government meteorologists have on their minds right now. Whatever the cause, this year I have seen more 15 and 30% risks for severe weather in the SPC’s extended outlook this year than ever before. And they don’t always end up being moderate or high risk days by the time the forecast gets a close to the valid date.

The end result of the SPC’s willingness to issue outlook areas further into the future is that news agencies and ultimately your friends and neighbors pick up on those forecasts, and are able to talk about them for longer. So you ARE hearing about storms more, because you get to hear about them for longer. I think this transition time with greater warning lead times for thunderstorms days is a transitional moment, and communication, as always, needs to be the most important thing.

If people are talking about forecasts for a longer period ahead of the forecast valid time, then the expectation is that that storm will be significant grows. It’s important that the extended outlooks are communicated with reasonable expectations, otherwise trust in the meteorology community (always low, of course) will wane, and the intended benefits of better forecast are ultimately counterproductive. Because we have an apparently elevated ability to forecast thunderstorms in the future, we should also be able to forecast without dire terminology in every forecasting scenario.

There was a moderate risk for severe weather in an event that had been advertised for almost a week in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa on Monday. Ultimately, it verified with a strong line of thunderstorms, hail and a few embedded thunderstorms, however the line split and completely missed the largest population center within the moderate risk area. The Twin Cities didn’t really even get a drop of rain.

Ultimately, models will get better and more refined, and forecasts can get drilled down even further. In the interim, because of the nature of storms and the irregular distribution of population, a very good forecast registered as a poor one for many people. Is the extended outlook providing the benefit it intends to? The relationship between meteorologists, the media and the population needs to thrive on open communication so the improvements can be appreciated by all.