🍂🌪️ The Tides Are Turning, Slowly
The jet stream is starting a trend of appearing over the C/S Plains more often.
I know this sounds ridiculous if you live in Texas or Oklahoma — but the jet stream is beginning (albeit slowly) that march south that happens in the autumn.
Please don’t throw hot tomatoes at me.
I think this is a sign of what we’ve already been seeing: a slow uptick in severe storm activity further south. The Fall season typically happens in reverse to the Spring season, with the activity starting north in August/September before migrating south by November. Typically, activity is more sparse on the back end of the season, but we can have some really big years.
Additionally, there is some evidence that warmer global temperatures will lead to more ‘off-calendar’ tornado events. I think you can already see some of this in tornado counts, with Oklahoma seeing above-average fall activity in five of the past seven years.
One of my shortcuts to seasonal forecasting for severe storms is “What is going on in the Gulf?”
Warmer temperatures can hold more moisture, and when Oceans are warmer, that trend can feed better dewpoints northwards out of the Gulf of Mexico. We still have some ways to go in the hurricane season, but if the Gulf remains untouched mainly over the next month, it is a fair assumption that unseasonably high moisture will make its way north with strong jet stream winds.
So when the Gulf is nearly entirely above average, all you need is a favorable upper air pattern to increase the severe weather chances significantly. Given the increasing likelihood of ridging/blocking in the western U.S. as a response to a developing La Niña, that isn’t guaranteed.
Still, there will likely be a week or two where the upper air pattern is favorable, and all you’ll need at that point is the jet fuel to the south to come up over the Plains.
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