Darrin Rasberry
You just jinxed us. Therefore it will likely be one of the worst years ever, due to one of Murphy's Laws corollary.
Murphy's Laws
Addition to Murphy's Laws
- If anything can go wrong, it will.
- If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong.
- If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
- If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
- Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
- Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
- Mother nature is a *****.
In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right ... something is wrong.
Gumperson's Law
The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability.
In particular it seems our severe weather season will be messed up by Gumperson's Law above. Oh, and I haven't found it yet, but I know there is a law that says if you state something will happen, it won't.
Oh, let me add, (of course there is the chance you could be right), that rather than a record year it could be an early, and short year for tornadoes too. We know what is behind door number 1 & 2, but what are the numbers behind doors 3 thru 12? Weather tends to average itself out, and if you have a big burst you often then have a lull. Guess I haven't actually thought about your stats - only to joke, but if I were to guess I would say we have an active early season pattern which is early when looking at climatology. The season tends to start in this area, then move to Florida area, eventually to Tx/Ok then further north generally speaking. My fear would be a pattern change within a month that would cause all this to break down and that is typical, if it hasn't happened already.
And to add to the melee, I'll toss in THIS (all in good humor of course):
The Mother Nature Don't Care Bout Us Law: "No matter what we say or do, wish for or predict, Mother Nature will do her own seemingly random dance until we humans are smart enough to know all of the countless variables."
Although Mother Nature's mighty phallic symbols will likely tend toward the statistics in the past, statistics are only a human tool used to analyze the frequency of phenomena in order to make predictions about future outcomes under similar circumstances, with certain high and low counts representing confidence intervals calculated from the idea of "standard deviation."
Of course we can feel like we're pretty confident in saying "the stats show that there will be x tornadoes this calendar year, with a standard deviation of y tornadoes [thus producing a confident range interval of tornadoes that will occur in a calendar year], thus since z tornadoes have happened already, the rest of the year will likely see x-z tornadoes, give or take a small number, because the statistics show how unlikely it will be to proceed like this for the rest of the year." Of course our statistics mark years because we do; if we guessed by the statistics for only a six-week deep winter period, then after the early January outbreak we could, by the stats book, reasonably have concluded with an incredible amount of statistical confidence that there would not be another outbreak until beyond the middle of February.
But, despite the man-made chances, an even larger midwinter outbreak occurred almost exactly a month later just south and east of the same area.
Mother Nature won't be listening to us dinky humans. Since there is, by all current knowledge, no year-long-lasting, undetectable, limited pool of energy from which tornadoes subtract, there's no way to tell, either way, how this season will be (although all joking aside I'm sure everyone here knows that in their heart of hearts). The U.S. could bust out so bad that Canada ends up with a higher count than we do for the rest of the year; we could see tons of tornadoes, but in limited situations where (thankfully) nothing gets higher than an EF-1 and nothing stays on the ground for more than a few seconds; we could see a Tornado Alley outbreak on par with the Super Outbreak, with snail-paced EF-5's giving all of us incredible video and doing no more damage than the hair pulled out of crop insurance executive's heads; there could be another Twelve Days of H-E-Doublehockeysticks like in 2003 with large twisters terrorizing Tornado Alley and killing dozens, if not hundreds.
We could have the best season ever with harmless ranch-trotters looking pretty for us; we could have the worst season ever with outbreak after outbreak in the Southeastern U.S., complete with 70+MPH bullets through the hills at night which cripple stormchasing efforts to both warn communities and capture worthwhile film or data (this is my own prediction). Or it can be business as usual, somewhere in between all of these extremes, with good tornadoes here and there in SLGTs and the routine yearly mod- or high- bust here in Iowa.
But if there ARE less tornadoes this year than average from here on out, I'm sure it will be for myriad reasons, most unknown thus far to humans, none of which revolve around mother nature making us mathematicians a little less O/C by following the statistical norm.
Last edited by a moderator: