How Lame Is 2009 Storm Season RE: VORTEX2?

I was peering through some severe weather stats yesterday thinking "how lame is this severe storm season" when USATodayWeather tweeted that a certain TV channel (on which you might find weather) has declared that this storm season is the calmest in at least 15 years. While that's great news for the general public, it's terribly ironic news for the VORTEX2 project and for our own Storm Chaser Shawn Smith who is with them. The whole idea of the project was to do a massive study of tornadoes (the first in, well, 15 years) from May 10 to June 13, normally the peak of Tornado Alley's season.

But so far few tornadoes has dropped and many days have been storm-free. As a result, the government retired their media vehicle in mid-May. Shawn has taken a tour of the National Weather Center and interviewed Discovery Channel's Sean Casey in his spare time; the Twitter feed from aforementioned channel has been reduced to doing madlibs out of boredom. Fortunately, VORTEX2 has plans to again next year. And the project's not over yet.

Let's look at some stats. If we look to seek proof of this "calm" 1-month period, unfortunately we have to look at a graph because the SPC stats are broken down into May vs. June while VORTEX2 takes half of each. I combined the SPC graphs from 2000-2008 and cut out the approximate VORTEX2 period to show above. The top graph is tornadoes, the bottom is all reports.

As you can see, no mid-May to mid-June period has started out this low for severe weather reports in this century. The low amount of tornadoes may have some competing years, but at least they'd be observing some severe weather out there if it was any other year!

But the red areas indicate that the period is not yet over - there are still 10 days left. During this time we might be able to end up ahead of some of the calm tornado years illustrated above (specifics below), though I don't think there's much hope to recover the number of severe weather reports to not make 2009 the calmest period since 2000 (and if you believe TWC, since 1994).

2009: 99 so far (35 of those were 5/13)2002: 1122006: 1282007: 157

*Somewhat inaccurate because these are U.S. tornadoes, not tornadoes only in the VORTEX2 chase area.

AccuWeather.com Professional's Joe Bastardi [BIO] (PRO USERS READ NOW | 30-DAY FREE TRIAL) said in his blog Monday morning:

If this summer's severe thunderstorm season continues to be calmer than usual, and the hurricane season is below-normal as predicted, we could end up with an unusually low natural disaster damage bill this year, which is good news for the U.S. Of course, all it takes is one hurricane or one F-5 tornado to change that. Below is a graph of yearly meteorological natural disaster damage in the U.S. since 1990, according to EMDAT.