No thunder. No wailing tornado sirens. There will be no beeping notifications at the bottom of TV screens during prime time.
The relative quiet you’re hearing is an indication of a very mild spring in Minnesota.
There have been some torrential downpours, and there are scattered reports of high wind or hail. But overall this is the quietest the region has seen in more than a decade. It’s also the eighth quietest start to a severe weather season on record at the National Weather Service dating back to 1986.
Caleb Grunzke is a Meteorologist at the National Weather Service of the Twin Cities. “We haven’t had any large-scale troughs that sweep across the area. That can bring us — as the systems we saw last may, which brought significant severe weather. “We just haven’t seen that at all in this year.”
You might remember that 2022 was a year of extreme weather. By this time in the year, there had been 438 warnings of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. This was likely a record for the state. There were some severe storms and tornadoes in Minnesota, such as those that struck Taopi and Forada.
This number has dropped by about 90% this year.
Grunzke stated that the pattern of a summery spring is also a part of why it’s been such a dry season for the majority of the state.
He said: “We are more in a tropical airmass system, where there are no strong fronts or low-pressure systems moving through the area.” “You’ve got, like, weak boundaries and weak flow aloft.” Thunderstorms don’t last long when they do form. The storms appear and then dissipate in an hour. They’re not big rain producers, but they aren’t long-lived.
The data is hard to interpret. Over the years, Minnesota has seen a lot of variation in broad overviews like 5-year and 10 year averages. In the past, the data from Iowa State University Mesonet has shown that a year with few warnings does not persist through the following years.
We don’t look at the sky with the same eyeballs, so it’s hard to see long-term trends. Radars with more sophisticated technology, satellite images, and even social media, which allows people to post weather updates in real time online, have all changed how the National Weather Service (the official source for watches and warnings) weighs and issues severe weather alerts. It’s difficult to compare apples to apples over time.
Grunzke, speaking of the low number of alerts this year, said: “I don’t think there’s a trend or atmospheric reason that we’re declining.” “I think it’s an anomaly. It has been slower than in previous years.