After a stormy winter, most of Minnesota has seen an unusually quiet spring
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Hear that?
No thunder. No wailing tornado sirens. No beeping alerts streaming across the bottom of prime-time TV screens.
That relative silence you hear is a sign of an exceedingly quiet spring, severe weather-wise, across Minnesota.
While there’ve been some torrential rains and scattered reports of high winds or hail, overall it’s the quietest it has been in the region for more than a decade — and the eighth-quietest start to the severe weather season in National Weather Service records dating back to 1986.
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“Basically, we’ve been devoid of upper-level flow,” said Caleb Grunzke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Twin Cities. “We haven’t had any troughs, large-scale troughs, that sweep through the area, that can bring us — like the systems that we saw last May, where they brought very significant severe weather events. ... We just haven’t had that at all this year.”
And 2022, you might recall, was a big year for big weather. There had been 438 severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings by this point in that year, likely an all-time high for the state. They included some devastating storm outbreaks, including tornadoes that hit Taopi and Forada, Minn.
This year, that number is down about 90 percent.
Grunzke said the summer-ish pattern is also part of the reason it has been such a dry spring for most of the state.
“We’re kind of in more like a tropical airmass regime, where you don’t have strong fronts and low-pressure systems coming through the region,” Grunzke said. “You have, like, very weak boundaries and very weak flow aloft. When thunderstorms do form, they don’t last very long. They pop up and then they dissipate within an hour or so. So they’re not long-lived, big rainfall producers.”
It’s hard to tease any patterns out of the data — broader overviews, like 5-year and 10-year averages, have been bouncing around for decades across Minnesota. And in the past, a single year with very few warnings hasn’t ever really persisted through subsequent years in the nearly four decades of data weather available online through Iowa State University’s Mesonet, a key data repository for weather in the Midwest.
It’s also hard to identify long-term trends because we aren’t watching the skies with the same eyes. More-sophisticated radar, advanced satellite imaging, even social media that lets people post real-time weather updates online — they’ve all changed the way the National Weather Service, the official source of watches and warnings, weighs and issues those severe weather alerts. That makes it hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons over time.
“I don't think it’s necessarily an atmospheric reason or trend that we’re decreasing,” Grunzke said of this year’s low number of alerts. “I guess it’s just been an anomaly. It’s been slow, for sure, compared to past years.”