MY PERSONAL SEASON
Tornadoes: 16 on 7 days
Quality tornadoes: 8 on 5 days (4/24, 5/18, 6/5, 6/20, 6/28)
Obnoxious collage with different storms/tors in each shot:
My "visible in a photo or video" tornado count of 16 is technically a career high, although previous years that came close (2011 and 2016) might've had fewer bird farts and stat padders in the mix; this year's June 5-6 sequence around Lubbock was a stat padder bonanza.
Against all my expectations pre-season, and even by late May honestly, this has been one of my best seasons. It featured candidates for my best tornado day ever (6/28) and best structured storm ever (6/7). Even removing both of those, it would've been a reasonably good season with multiple quality tornado days and additional good structure days. The fact that this came on the heels of active seasons in 2023-24 only makes these results all the more surprising. I’ve certainly never had another three-year stretch anywhere near this good.
As I'll probably talk about more in my general thoughts, the geographical distribution of central US activity this spring was almost immaculate in my book. I saw quality storms on numerous days, and all of them were either in the southern High Plains or the eastern Dakotas, two of the easiest and most pleasant chase zones on the planet. There were a few significant events way out in the Midwest and Mid South, even later into May which is always annoying as a Plains snob -- but the number of quality Plains days overshadowed that enough not to bother me.
I've been moaning for years about the slow death of June, and with it, the northern Plains' core season. This year was a good reminder that its coffin isn’t sealed yet, even if the climate might gradually be trending that way. On June 19-20, and then again on June 28, I took the kind of long trips north for Dakotas tornadoes that I've been dreaming of -- but not sensing practical opportunities for -- for quite a few years. June 28 was a surreal bonanza of training, structured supercells spawning long-lived, photogenic tornadoes in practically the same spot over a 3-hour period. The experience of making those trips north around the solstice -- 10pm sunsets, everything green, no worries about crashing cold fronts, practically unlimited moisture and instability -- was everything I’d romanticized it to be. When those late season trips north deliver memorable results, it's a kind of euphoria that eclipses most other chase scenarios by a comfortable margin. It reminded me that I probably won't ever be able to pry myself away from this ridiculous activity, even if it’s sometimes full of heartache for years at a time. In fact, coming off those amazing trips, I've been thinking a lot about how absurd most of my early-mid season desperation chases look by comparison. Ironically, it almost hurts to verify to myself that the "active June north of I-70" regime that's been so jarringly MIA the last 15 years really is as blissful as I thought; to be reminded that it’s probably the absolute pinnacle of our hobby, and one of the primary regimes that helped get a lot of veterans from the late 20th century addicted.
To be sure, not everything was flowers and rainbows. My frustration with crowds and conga lines reached a new level of seriousness this year, which I elaborated on in the dedicated thread here. Also, I missed the TOTY and possible TOTD on June 16 by noping out on 20+ degree T/Td spreads 8 hours from home in the middle of the workweek. I continued not to make great storm-scale decisions in terms of roads, positioning, and timing, which has been my Achilles heel for as long as I've been able to find tornadic supercells. The month of May was honestly not that great, in my opinion. I saw Arnett, but if I hadn't, the whole month would've pretty much been a wash for me with a couple days of B- to B structure and a bunch more cap busts, grungy slop, and synoptically interesting setups/patterns crapping out. Without a doubt, June saved my season and then some... hell, it pretty much was my season.
This was my 20th season on the Plains. Of the first 18 seasons, only 3 gave me quality tornadoes in all three main chase months (Apr-May-Jun), and those were all separated by at least 5 years. I’ve now hit that benchmark two years in a row (2024-2025), and very narrowly missed three years in a row. At this point, It’s clear this has been a pretty special stretch that I need to step back and appreciate… because it certainly can’t last forever, and it’s already lasted longer than I would’ve imagined possible!
Final piece of useless minutiae: I’m pretty sure this was my first year with quality tornadoes in 5 states (NM, TX, OK, SD, ND).
THOUGHTS ON THE SEASON OVERALL
It was a fascinating and topsy-turvy Plains season. I can't really think of any close comparisons going back to when I started in 2006.
Given the cool season La Nina and nascent drought conditions over the winter, I felt reasonably confident this would be a drought-stricken spring on the S/C Plains. If true, that meant elevated chances of a bad Plains season, or of something like 2011 or 2013 mainly focused east of I-35 even if it turned out active. And by mid-March, we were bearing horrific wildfires and 70 mph post-dryline winds that blanketed OKC with a full coating of west Texas dust. It looked like the nightmare 2006 redux scenario was fully on track. Then some glimmers of hope appeared in the form of a couple rainy systems for OK/TX by early-mid April… but the Plains still hadn’t given anyone a chase photo worth sharing at that point.
The April 24-28 sequence stands out as the inflection point that turned everything on its head. Out of nowhere, a nearly weeklong stretch of late season style setups for W TX and NM materialized, including nightly MCSs worthy of May or June. I can't remember ever seeing an extended "sloshing dryline" High Plains pattern like that so early in the season. The first two days, April 24-25, produced a string of tornadic supercells in the Panhandle that featured photo ops at the upper echelon of what April typically offers (especially Matador and Pampa/Miami on 4/24). The remaining days weren't as great (outside the Sandhills madness at dusk), but by the end of that week, drought was a distant memory for most of the Plains south of I-70. In fact, by early May, some areas like the Lubbock-Childress corridor were greener than I've ever seen them.
May was a mixed bag. It certainly didn't match the dizzying pace of 2024 when it came to quality tornadoes. The first half was pretty dead, all things considered, although there were multiple surprise overperformers deep into TX. The second half was better, but not exceptional. Arnett was a great storm, but that trough ejection badly underperformed its apparent potential when taking into consideration both 5/18 and 5/19. The activity over Memorial Day weekend into the following week was decent, but without much memorable outside of E CO on 5/23 and the very flukey postfrontal Clovis storm on 5/25. All in all, I'd argue May failed to capitalize on the miraculous removal of drought as a constraint, coming in around or slightly below average in historical terms.
If April slapped me into remembering that a cool season La Nina doesn’t always seal our fate with drought, June smacked me again by flaunting tremendous and even consistent results while I worried and moaned about a lack of classically favorable patterns. And I don’t just mean “big troughs;” even sustained SW flow over a broad warm sector was tough to find, but it didn’t seem to matter. My best guess is that PBL moisture and/or the character of the EML must have been subtly favorable. Either that, or we were just damn lucky with mesoscale details on quite a few different days. I’d argue that a 500 mb loop of June 2025 wouldn’t stick out as being far more favorable than many recent Junes that did virtually nothing. From the Morton-Amistad-Texline sequence to kick off the month to Wellfleet, Jamestown/Enderlin, Gary, and multiple other respectable ND tornado days in between all those, we squeezed some kind of divine lemonade out of an apparent pattern of lemons. I think most would agree June stole the show this year.
Other thoughts:
- The temporal pacing and consistency of quality Plains setups and storms this season was pretty good: probably on par with 2024, but not quite up to the level of 2023. Not much happened before late April, although the final week of the month made up for it. May was a weak point with lots of scoured moisture early on, a promising stretch mid-month that turned out a bit frustrating, and then an active but somewhat grungy late month pattern. June was… exceptionally consistent, and unlike anything we’ve seen in over a decade.
- The geographical distribution of quality Plains storms was simply fantastic. There were two main hotspots: (1) E NM and W TX into NW OK, and (2) the Dakotas, mainly east of the Missouri. Both are practically perfect chase areas in my book. The only legitimate complaint I can see is that KS, arguably the best chase state overall, continued its recent trend of underperformance. Still, if you were mobile enough to have both the S High Plains and N Plains/Siouxland in your domain, I don’t see how it could’ve been much better: numerous good days, with very few of them in garbage areas like N/C TX, C/E OK, W MO, etc… or even good but roadless areas like WY/MT. If every chase season were guaranteed a few good storms in this year’s hotspots, our hobby would become a far more reliable source of enjoyment overnight.
- It’s crazy to say after how much I’ve worried about a general downtrend in Plains activity with climate change, but 2023-25 pretty much has to be the best three-year stretch since 2003-05. I don’t think it tops 2003-05, but we’ve never put together a string like this since then, even though a few individual years were great. The reason 2003-05 stays firmly on top brings me to my final comment…
- The lack of synoptically evident outbreaks and obvious multi-storm dryline tornado events is getting exhausting to talk about. They practically stopped existing circa 2012-13, with a couple exceptions at the fringes of the Plains, or on the margins of the term “outbreak.” That’s 13 years! This may deserve its own thread, but I’m playing with the hypothesis that the 1990s-2000s were more of a long-term exception to the rule than we assumed at the time. That era gave the impression that big dryline outbreaks and verified HIGH risks on the Plains were all but guaranteed at least once every few years, and even that getting multiple events per year was -- while impressive -- not that exceptional. Our current era paints such a starkly different picture over such a long stretch now that it’s worth taking a step back. The implications for chasers, as I’ve said many times now, are quite interesting: first and foremost, the prototypical “casual chaser” gets kneecapped in this regime where Wellfleet and Gary are representative of how we cobble together good seasons. Not far behind in terms of pain would be serious chasers who live far outside the Alley and want to see a sustained or obvious pattern before deciding to make a trip. Fairly serious chasers living in the Alley like me come out alright, while the most hardcore “never stop chasing” crowd absolutely feasts. This has been the general rule for over a decade now; who knows whether a reversion to the mean is coming soon, but the past few years show there’s never any shortage of surprises that can include reversals of long-running trends.
