Will Wilkens
Thanks for offering hope!
-Greg
Greg, I hope you're feeling better now.
Thanks for offering hope!
-Greg
2003 was an el nino spring and it was very active for the midwest area. Just because the plains wont be in the hot spot doesn't mean the season will be a wash. I agree nothing can be worse than last year. If we look at what el nino has done recently it has spun up some very intense and moist storms systems. 3 total in the month of December.
I would certainly be in favor of one of these monsters spinning up in the spring time. My un-expert opinion would think that with the more intense southern stream we certainly won't have issues with shear profiles, although this means probably allot of rocket storm motions as well.
Its fun to speculate...but I doubt anyone can say with any degree of certainty. If anything it will be another year in which we continue to study the correlation between el nino and the weather patterns.
Actually 2003 featured several nice events in the southern Plains.
April 15 - several tornadoes in the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma.
April 19 - strong tornado near Copan, OK
May 1 - weak tornadoes in eastern OK
May 3 - tornadoes in west Texas
May 4 - significant tornado outbreak in eastern Kansas and western Missouri
May 8 - significant tornado outbreak in central OK and eastern Kansas
May 9 - second day in a row with tornadoes in OKC metro area
May 15 - significant tornado outbreak in Texas panhandle
While most of the tornado activity (numbers wise) hit the midwest (MO, IL, TN), the southern Plains saw several significant events from mid April to mid May. 2003 and 2004 is by far the best two successive tornado seasons for storm chasers.
Not to go against the grain here as a huge 2010 would make everyone happy after last year, but page 286 of Tim Vasquez's Storm Chasing Handbook (2nd Edition) indicates that 2003 was a La Nina season while 2004 was a neutral El Nino/La Nina season. I know for certain that El Nino and La Nina can have a huge impact on prevailing weather patterns and trends, but as far as 2003 is concerned, what were the prevailing conditions in the months leading up to spring?
The graph on page 22 of this document http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf would seem to indicate 2003 was primarily an El Nino year, I guess I'm just not sure about the way it was characterized in the Storm Chaser Handbook.
(January) Over N. America, strong ridging contributed to above-average temperatures over much of N. America. During February, troughing and below-average temperatures became reestablished over the middle latitudes, along with ridging and above-average temperatures over higher latitudes.
(issued 2/28/2010)CFS ensemble mean (heavy blue line) predicts El Niño will last through the Northern Hemisphere spring 2010.