Poll: Spring 2010 Severe Weather Activity

[WeatherWitness]

I created this poll primarily to see if there was a big difference in severe weather activity this past spring for cities in the US. I know that those members here who live in Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Minnesota will probably be selecting the option "More active than usual." However, for Dallas and the DFW area, from what I can remember, we did not experience much severe weather, if any at all, this year. Normally late-April through May is the time for us to be bombarded with severe weather, and it has certainly happened in past years. Storms with strong winds, heavy rain, hail, and (though not as often) a tornado threat are common and usually happen more than once. However, this year, there wasn't ANY of that for Dallas. We only had one severe thunderstorm WARNING this year, and that turned out to be a big bust because all of the storms went around our area. So I guess some cities around the DFW area had some severe weather this year, but the DFW metroplex had a rather quiet severe weather season.

So...what has severe weather been like for your area this past spring? I know a lot of cities are still getting that severe threat through the summer, as well.

[Localonthe8s]

Less active. They always say South Jersey will get hit by strong thunderstorms, but over half of the times we don't even get a raindrop.

[toxictwister00]

It's been about average, not really that active as 2008 and 2009 was, but I think that was partly due to the moderate La Nina then and we still had an El Nino around while our Severe Weather season which usually results in an active season, but since it was waning, I guess that could be why it wasn't that active.

EDIT: Surprisingly no Tornado Warnings were issued for my area this year, which is odd since it was a completely different story last year and 2008.

[TWCToday]

Below average here

[wxntrafficfan]

I'm going to vote more, but only by a very small margin. We of course had that severe weather on Spring Break back in April (had a tornado warning). But outside of that, everything has been normal. Most of the severe weather has been in June, which is pretty much normal here.

[twcclassics]

Depends on where you are. If you're in the midwest, it's definitely more active than normal. In fact, in looking at the maps, this pattern is reminiscent of 1993.

[Mike M]

About average I'll say. While we didn't get many rounds of severe weather, we did get severe storms back in March which brought several trees down.

[P71nnacle]

It's been a little bit busier than normal in Central/Western PA, but not terribly special. It seems like York and Lancaster counties have been getting the usual Tornado Warnings every time we're under a Slight risk  but at least here in State College, not much. Pittsburgh's been getting hit in groups of three or four days, then you have times like this where it's sunny for an entire week.

Severe thunderstorms should be more rare in theory because of the raising of minimum hail size from 3/4" to 1" (sounds like a very small difference, but simple math shows that a 33% increase in hail size means the hail's volume is 77% larger, meaning the updraft has to be a lot stronger - and much more rare. Thus, less warnings issued.)