Active Weather Pattern Continues, Even with a “Winter Break”

The regular arrival of storm systems over the past couple of weeks has been welcome in that we’re finally making a little headway in our drought. We’re not out of it yet; we’ll need to see this return to near-normal precipitation continue through spring to make sure we’re in good shape for the hot, drier months of summer. Our early April cold snap seems to be just a speed bump, as we appear to be headed back to a pattern of seeing a storm system every few days once the warmer air returns.

One very interesting aspect of this run of storm systems so far is that we’ve managed to dodge most of the severe weather that has plagued much of the Southeast so far this spring. The pattern has set up pretty similarly now; strong to severe thunderstorms blow up on a cold front to our west…but at the same time, big storms blow up to our south closer to the Gulf Coast. As the southern storms blossom and push to the northeast, they have been disrupting the flow of moisture headed our way, while also keeping us cloudier and our atmosphere more stable; thunderstorms have more energy to draw from if the weather is warmer. By the time the western storms make it this far east, they’re suffering from either a lack of moisture or a lack of that unstable air, so they have been a shadow of their former selves.

There’s no guarantee that run of luck will continue for us. But as spring goes on, statistically the zone of highest concentration of severe weather starts to shift westward out of the Deep South and more towards the southern Plains, then northward from there. Hopefully we can keep a few more rounds of those beneficial rains coming without tapping into any of the severe weather.