By Jason Vance
Special to the Gladstone Dispatch

The severe weather season has had an early and active start this year and according to USDA Meteorologist Brad Rippey, it is expected to continue.

“We still have two-thirds of the peak of the season ahead of us,” Rippey said. “That being May and June before we start to settle down in the mid to late summer months with less severe weather at that point.”

Rippey said in the month of March an estimated 300 tornadoes were seen across the United States, which is well above average and most of that activity focused across the Mid-South and lower Midwest.

As active as March was, April topped it with over 300 tornadoes and has pushed the season to date for the United States to nearly 700 tornadoes during the first four months of the year.

In April severe weather was spread out across most days of the month with a big outbreak early in the month when flooding was seen in the Ohio valley and into the lower Midwest.

“More recently we’ve seen kind of a daily number of severe weather outbreaks starting back during the second half of the month and pretty much continuing every day to the present,” Rippey said.

April’s severe weather outbreaks have shifted into more traditional Tornado Alley areas of the Central and Great Plains, however Rippey says there has still been a fair share of storms in the Mid-South and lower Midwest, with most of those have been confined to the southeastern half of the Midwest.

“Only recently have we seen those storms extending farther north,” Rippey said. “There have been isolated tornadoes from Nebraska to as far north as Minnesota and Wisconsin.”

Rippey doesn’t expect any real change, in that severe weather will be seen daily somewhere in the country.

“Now we are back to the areas that have been hit repeatedly in March and April,” Rippey said.

Monthly averages in the U.S. include 269 tornadoes for May and 191 for June. With over 300 tornadoes in April, severe weather is well above the average of 190.