Welcome to Prepare 2025, where Scott and I, along with our friends at Eagle Media, help get you ready for the upcoming severe weather season! Throughout this week, we will be looking back at last season, giving you some preparedness tips on how to safely navigate the upcoming months, along with a look ahead at what’s to come.
This week’s topics:
A Look Back | Rangeland Fires | How to Get Reliable Weather Alerts |
About the Fur Kids… | A Busy or Blah 2025?
Looking Back at 2024
The 2024 severe weather season was more representative of a typical severe weather season in Kansas, with activity mainly centered in the March through May window. The main reason for this was a quick transition from El Niño into a neutral phase of the ENSO, which led to a more active storm track across the region. June was quiet as high pressure built in and we transitioned into the summer heat.
Overall, it was as close to a normal tornado season as we’ve had in a long time, with 76 occurring. That number is five off the 30-year average of 81. Continuing the pattern we’ve seen over the last couple of seasons, the hot spot remained along and east of the Kansas Turnpike, with Wilson County the recipient of seven tornadoes last season.
This decade is on track to be one of the quietest since the 1980s. From 2020-24, Kansas has recorded 230 tornadoes, or an average of 46 per year.
Want an even more impressive stat to highlight the quiet tornado period in our state?
It has been 3,204 days since the last time Kansas witnessed 20 or more tornadoes in a calendar day. On May 24, 2016 (the infamous “Dodge City Day”,) 34 twisters touched down in a four-and-a-half-hour tornado outbreak across southwest Kansas. In fairness to this stat, we did come close to ending this streak on April 27, when 17 tornadoes were observed, mainly across the Flint Hills and southeast Kansas.
Our Chase Season
The 15th chase season for Scott and I kicked off in northwest Oklahoma on February 9, when we chased storms coming out of the Texas Panhandle. The storms weakened as they approached southern Kansas, but did bring us some much needed rainfall.
After a relatively quiet March, the season began to pick up in April. The April 27th event was a frustrating event, one that started with storms south of Wichita and ended with a bust in the fields west of Alva, Oklahoma. We say some heavy rain and scary looking clouds, but not much else.
The May 6th high risk event started with storms near the Greensburg area, following them into the Hutchinson area, before ending the chase. Thankfully for much of the area, morning low clouds and drizzle was just enough to hold off what could have been a bad day. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the town of Barnsdall, OK, which suffered a strike from an EF-4 tornado.
Just 13 days later, on May 19, we were following a supercell that evolved into a derecho across the eastern half of Kansas. The storm produced up to three tornadoes along I-70 in Russell and Ellsworth counties, before blowing through Salina with winds of 100 mph.
The last significant event for May came on the 25th, when much of southern Kansas was in a moderate risk for severe weather. Storms fired up in northern Oklahoma late in the afternoon, and tracked into Barber county, where we intercepted them. Around 6:45 pm near Hazelton, we witnessed a cone tornado touch down for 2-3 minutes. It would track east, before dissipating a few minutes later. Around 7:20, we witnessed a second tornado touch down west of Anthony, as the storm morphed into a high-precipitation supercell. That tornado went on to produce EF-2 damage to a farmstead north of town.
What Does This Season Hold for Kansas?
This, in the business, is what we call a tease. Coming up on Friday, meteorologist Brad Ketcham and I will look back at how the weather we had this past Fall and Winter could impact us this Spring.