2012 Severe Weather Outlook

Well...It looks like spring is almost here (even though as I type this there is strong cold advection doing its dirty work outside my window) and its time to try and poke my head into the future to see what spring may hold in terms of severe weather. Ive looked at a few sign and signals and this post will portray if they point to a more normal season which is pretty intense itself here in the southeast...or if the potential for severe weather is above or below normal.

I was gonna do some analogs for this season but since that didnt work out to well for the winter outlook I will stick to the facts here..nothing but the facts.

First lets look at where we are headed in terms of ENSO


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What we see here is us headed out of La Nina and into weak El Nino territory most likely... but during spring we should be near neutral ENSO conditions and that will not hamper severe weather in any way that I can find. The important thing here is that we have two major changes going on with winter transitioning into summer and La Nina transitioning into El Nino.


Next we will look at severe weather trends over the first part of 2012 and compare them to the same time last year in 2011

Here we have the spc reports since the first of January this year..as you can see its been pretty active for what is supposed to be a cold time of the year.



When we look back at last years graph we can see that severe weather was almost nil for this time of year before the active timeframe spike occured.


One can draw several different conclusions from that... but the conclusion I am drawing already is that the Gulf of Mexico is very warm and will be primed by the time our "spike" gets here.


Now speaking of the Gulf of Mexico lets look at the water temps because this is the fuel for severe weather in our area.

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Sure enough they are above normal. The lack of an extended period of colder weather over the southeast has allowed the waters of the gulf of Mexico to stay pretty warm and this is a pretty important signal that says an above normal severe wx season is likely. Now before you get too worked up there are some things that could possibly argue for a more normal or even below normal severe weather season.

The main thing that comes to mind is that the North Atalntic Oscillation has been mostly positive for many months and one could argue that it should be mostly negative this spring and this could offset an above average season to more of a normal type season. A negative NAO would try to suppress a Jet stream thats trying to come north due to seasonal change and could keep the stormtrack right over us or to our south mostly.

After looking at these and several more features I expect an average to above average severe weather season in terms of reports and there will likely be at least one major and widespread severe weather outbreak in the southeastern United States.