ORLANDO, Fla. – ‘Tis the season officially, as fall really starts to come down through much of the lower forty-eight! Unfortunately, it’s not all fun and games considering there’s another season getting started alongside the fall and the continuation of action in the tropics: tornado season.
We’re at the pivotal point on the calendar where “transition season,” as we’ve coined it in Air Force weather, is well underway.
What this means is our jet stream becomes a lot more robust and almost aggravated to an extent, really dipping south on occasion with stronger bouts of cooler air pouring in from the Canadian provinces and upper tier U.S.
We also still have leftover summertime-style warmth that usually remains in place across the south. The heat can be stubborn to leave as we traverse the rest of October and much of November, and that makes for some chaotic weather when cooler air clashes with this bubble of heat.
That’s what tends to drive the second tornado season of the year. We call it the second, simply because during the transition between winter into spring, we’ll see the same clashing of air masses across the Plains, the Deep South, Dixie Alley, even as far north of the Great Lakes and the Mid-West.
We’re already starting to see signs of these battles coming together as we get deeper into October and especially November. It’s usually the turning point from around Halloween through to Thanksgiving when things really start to kick off in the severe weather department.
We’ll be watching for stronger-than-ordinary troughs whipping down from out of the Rockies and into the Plains. These troughs, just like sometimes with tropical features, tend to magnetize and draw warmth north as the wind flow around the leading edge changes from westerly to southerly.
That southerly flow helps prime the environment out ahead of a trough and an approaching cold front for a pretty noticeable gradient, or rapid change from warm to cool over a small geographic area.
In fact, Storm Prediction Center already has an area marked for a rather elevated risk of severe weather five days from now.
The Dixie Alley area of Arkansas, Louisiana and portions of Mississippi, up to southern Missouri and Illinois are already highlighted for a 15% probability of strong thunderstorms.
Since this is their extended range outlook, SPC will only highlight regions with an above average chance of seeing isolated to scattered severe thunderstorms, to include the threat for tornadoes.
So it seems like this article comes just in time to unveil when it is we start to see a combination of the fall season, the hurricane season, and severe weather season coming together for simultaneous activity.
Thankfully, one thing you should know as a Floridian, given the La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, we’ll likely see little of this severe weather action between now through to the start of spring next year.