In what has become known to most as year that has had anything but typical weather, 2009 rounds out the year with nearly 2/3 of the U.S. covered in snow!
We seem to be in between two major storm systems, but that didn’t stop a shortwave trough from returning brisk cold air and a snow for the 3rd time in a week to the Southern Plains. While the northeast is feeling the last of a departing storm system and the northwest is starting to feel the effects of the next one, things on the whole are rather tranquil in what has largely been an uneventful year weatherwise in the U.S.
From a storm chasing perspective, this was probably the worst year since 1988 for chasing tornadoes, it still provided a few events for those that were dedicated enough to stick it out and salvage something. The highlight of the convective season was of course the tornado event in eastern Wyoming that was featured in the season finale of the Storm Chasers show on Discovery Channel.
While that was a nice tornado over open land that lasted a while, it was rather unnewsworthy as far as tornadoes go, except for the fact that it was surrounded by more photographers, meteorologists, probes, instruments and live cameras that any other tornado in history. It was even sampled directly by both Sean Casey’s Tornado Intercept Vehicle and Reed Timmer’s Dominator, both instrumented vehicles. The amount of data that had to be gathered on that tornado and storm is unprecedented! This, in my opinion, makes this the single biggest storm chasing day of the year.
There was also the Hurricane Season. Rather the lack of a Hurricane Season. While we had a few strong storms develop, they all stayed out to sea and the U.S. remained hurricane free this year except for a couple of minor tropical events.
But as we rolled into the winter months now, El Nino, perhaps one of the strongest in history, is really getting things cranked up, and storm systems, as typical in El Nino years, are starting to slam through the southern U.S. with regular frequency. This is one of the wetter winters we have had in quite some time on the western edge of the Southern Plains. The last couple of years at this time, we were fighting high winds and wildfires!
Just today, we had some minor snow, courtesy of a strong cold front and a short wave moving overhead.
Of course, as we often do in winter, storm chasers now start speculating on the coming season, and gaze into the crystal forecast ball looking for any clues on what we can expect for severe weather.
I’m going out on a limb here with my long range “forecast” and say that the southeast states will soon start seeing repeated severe weather events and tornadoes on a higher frequency than they often do in the late winter months. As we approach, and move into March, I think things will light up early and last well into June for Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. I mostly base this forecast crystal ball-cast on two elements. The El Nino, which may or may not be staring to wane as we move into spring, but otherwise should still be affecting our weather, and two, the moisture we already have had.
Typically it seems that on years we have very dry winter seasons in Texas and Oklahoma, especially in west Texas, the less active severe weather is west of the I35 corridor. Mostly this is due to only shallow moisture being able to make it up from the Gulf of Mexico over parched land in drought conditions that likes to leech all it can get from the atmosphere, and the end result is a dryline that races east, leaving everything practically west of I35 in the dry air, and thus no thunderstorms.
This winter has been the complete opposite of that. Instead of drought and fires we are decently wet right now. El Nino should continue to provide the upper storm systems to kick off the rain/snow and eventually thunderstorms when things start warming up. It’s all up to the mesoscale fine details at that point.
I got a little more in depth than I intended to their in my post to end out the year, so I’ll leave it at that and we’ll talk more about it a little later!
I hope everyone got accomplished what they wanted to in 2009, and get more accomplished in 2010!
Tags: chasing, forecast, snow, west texas, winter weather