Tornado season when is it

The attached chart below is the sounding diagram across northern Kansas for this evening. The vertical wind profile indicates the veering winds with height, with a textbook curvature of the hodograph upper right , favoring organized rotating storms. High instability in the hail-growth region also hints at an enhanced potential for severe hail. Above: Sounding diagram for northern Kansas, Wednesday evening. If an intense MCS does evolve, very damaging winds with locally near hurricane-force gusts, could develop along the leading edge of this cluster as it surges east-southeast along with the nose of a pronounced low-level jet from the south.

Above: Storm Prediction Center wind threat forecast. Further south across the southern Plains, isolated severe thunderstorms will also develop across the High Plains into west Texas.

Strong afternoon heating will once again allow surface parcels to reach their convective temperatures by late afternoon. Another potentially dangerous severe weather outbreak is likely also tomorrow, on Thursday, May 27th.

It might be upgraded to moderate MDT risk in the future updates of the outlook. Scattered severe thunderstorms are likely on Thursday and Thursday night from parts of the southern Great Plains into the Ozarks and middle Mississippi Valley. Very large hail, significant severe wind gusts, and several tornadoes are all well possible. Above: Storm Prediction Center severe weather threat forecast Thursday.

The main concern then comes again in the afternoon and evening hours further south, across Kansas, Oklahoma, parts of Texas into the Ozarks. Above: Extreme instability across the warm sector from the Texas Panhandle to Oklahoma. The strong heating near the front and outflow boundary from the overnight activity will likely be preferable locations for thunderstorm development by mid-late afternoon. The HRRR model guidance of simulated reflectivity through the Thursday evening hours hints at the scattered to widespread thunderstorm activity from the eastern Texas Panhandle across parts of Oklahoma into north-central Missouri and western Illinois.

Intense discrete supercells with very large to giant hail will be possible over Texas and Oklahoma. Storms will continue growing upscale and merge into a larger system or two MCS through the evening and night hours. As we can see from the attached sounding diagram chart for the eastern Texas Panhandle below, the hail-growth region depicts a very high available potential energy, a textbook example for strongly enhanced severe hail threat.

This layer has an important role when it comes to growing hailstones. Above: Sounding diagram for northern eastern Texas panhandle, Thursday evening. The main cause for tornadoes in this region is the warm, humid air rising up from the Gulf of Mexico and moving swiftly over the flat plains.

Without geographic barriers to slow the weather system, it rapidly meets the cool, dry air in the region creating ideal conditions for storms and tornado formation. This is why tornado season in this region is from about May to June, though there can also be an increase in tornado formation in the early fall, so you should always be prepared. As the warm air from the Gulf continues to move through the center of the United States and over the Southern Plains region, it comes in contact with cool air in the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains regions, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska.

These areas experience tornado season during June and July when the weather starts to turn from cool to hot. Keep an eye out for severe thunderstorms and mixing weather systems as part of tornado preparation. Supercell thunderstorms are prone to tornado formation because they contain a vortex at the center that can grow in size quickly if there is a substantial amount of warm, moist air to mix with the cold, dry air in the region.

The cold air is pulled toward the ground as the warm air is siphoned upward. With enough weight and speed, the air becomes a powerful funnel that touches the ground to create a tornado. Tornadoes can happen anywhere in the world at any time of the day, however, locations like the U. This is largely associated with landfalling tropical cyclones, particularly in Florida. When it comes to strong tornadoes, or those causing the majority of deaths and damages, the map looks relatively similar.

In most of the big tornado states — places like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas — the peak for strong tornadoes is unsurprisingly about the same for the peak of tornadoes overall. There is also a peppering of March in the Southeast and a few changes elsewhere. April delivered an astounding tornadoes, bolstered by the Super Outbreak focused on the 27th. Behind that, the top five months are all May. As recently as May , the United States saw an incredible tornadoes as outbreak after outbreak occurred mid- and late month.

The current year running average is about tornadoes in the busiest month of a year and it has been relatively steady for about a decade. Keep in mind there is inflation over time due to increasing spotter activity and detection technology.

The current average for strong tornadoes in a peak month is in the mids, near where it has hovered since the advent of Doppler.

Even with some expectations in mind, individual tornado outbreaks can make or break a peak month, and it seems likely that some longer-term shifts are ongoing thanks to climate change.