When is Severe Weather Season For You?

NOTE: I am at another yardsale this weekend (in Milesburg, PA) and will not be online until Sunday (I will auto-launch another blog entry Saturday morning). As during the last yardsale, I'll be reading Mike Smith's "Warnings" book.

One of the questions that I see fairly frequently on the Pennsylvania Storm Chasers Facebook Group is: When is severe weather season in Pennsylvania? Should we expect to see, on average, storms by April? May? And when should the season peak? These dates can be important when trying to determine how active the season has been so far, and when it might start and end.

The SPC has some neat maps and graphs of when severe weather season is for 150 regions of the United States, defined as the maximum radar range from each NEXRAD Doppler radar. This data is based on NWS spotter reports between 1980 and 2006.

Check yours out, you may find it very interesting. Here is the graph for the "Central Pennsylvania (State College) Radar" which coincidentally covers most of the state:

What the data next to the graph says is that our severe weather season is normally Apr 27 - Sep 05 with a peak on July 8th. The graph also shows a peak around the end of May, a time in which I have seen plenty of severe weather here. Before April and after August, you can pretty much forget about it.

They also have maps showing severe weather since 1980 which can help you determine if you're in a favored area or a "tornado hole" like we are here in the geographical center of the state. Note from this map, it's better to live in the western or eastern parts of the state if you want to see a tornado.

If you live to our north, check out Brett Anderson's blog about when and where tornado season occurs in Canada.