Watts Up With That?

WUWT readers may remember last year that we had an early outbreak of Tornado season, and media opportunist Senator John Kerry immediately jumped at the chance to blame the weather event on “global warming” as we reported here on WUWT:

Kerry appeared on MSNBC on February 6 to discuss storms that have killed at least 50 people throughout the Southeastern United States. So, of course, Kerry used the platform to advance global warming alarmism.

“[I] don’t want to sort of leap into the larger meaning of, you know, inappropriately, but on the other hand, the weather service has told us we are going to have more and more intense storms,” Kerry said. “And insurance companies are beginning to look at this issue and understand this is related to the intensity of storms that is related to the warming of the earth. And so it goes to global warming and larger issues that we’re not paying attention to. The fact is the hurricanes are more intensive, the storms are more intensive and the rainfall is more intense at certain places at certain times and the weather patterns have changed.”

See the original WUWT report here.

So, this year is a little bit different. We have a late and slow start to tornado season. Always a good thing. That being said, this report from Joe D’Aleo discusses why its been slow, and debunks a recent Weather Channel claim that the current deficit of tornadoes has something to do with “global warming”.  Seeing how global warming causes both individual tornado events and decreased tornado events, I’ve apparently terribly underestimated its omnipotent power to influence weather. ;-)

Graph from NWS/NOAA. Smaller (F1) tornadoes seem to be on the increase, but not larger ones.

Even though tornado reports seem to be on the rise, the larger damaging tornados, F2-F5 don’t seem to be. There are some good reasons for this, and it might be a good primer for readers to revisit this report I made about the issue of tornado reporting:

Increasing tornadoes or better information gathering?

BTW, if anyone wants a really cool weather radar program for tracking severe storms, please see my StormPredator program here – Anthony

After another La Nina season with again a lot of snow and precipitation in the north central, another relatively active tornado season was expected and so far it has delivered on that promise. However given the La Nina was not as strong and the rebound in the Pacific towards El Nino is a month earlier than last year, the number of storms so far, have been less. It looks like May will fall well short of last May’s 461 tornadoes.

Cedar Hill, Texas, Photo credit Pat Skinner, TTU

The annual summary to date can be found here. The tornadoes so far in 2009 have been in the southeast quadrant of the nation. Climatologically, that is where the season normally begins. Read the rest of this entry »

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, ICECAP

May has been frigid slowing the planting and emergence of the summer crops in Canada. Late freezes and even snows are still occurring regularly and can be expected the rest of the month.

See larger image here.

The chart above shows the May 2009 temperature anomaly through May 24th. Parts of central Canada (Churchill, Manitoba) are running 16 degrees F below normal for the month through the 26th (map ends 24th). Every day this month has seen lows below freezing in Churchill and only 6 out of the first 26 days days had highs edge above freezing. The forecast the rest of the month is for more cold with even some snow today in Churchill and again this weekend perhaps further south.

Hudson Bay remains mostly frozen though most of the seasonal melting occurs in June and July most years. Read the rest of this entry »