2019 Spring Tornado Forecast For Oklahoma

It was a crazy winter, and lots of folks are saying is that going to happen again as we move on into the spring. Well, we can tell you this: El Nino has had a huge impact on our weather and what has the brought?

Well, basically El Nino brings very warm waters - ocean waters in the Pacific. It also messes with the winds, and when it starts to mess with the winds, it starts to mess with us. 

El Nino is weakening. That doesn't mean a whole lot right now, but with time that will change the jet stream pattern.

As well as the jet stream changes, so will the storm tracks. As the storm tracks change, that will influence our weather because we have been stuck in the southern branch of the jet stream being very powerful. The northern branch has been very powerful too.

That's what has kept us wetter than normal across a big chunk of the United States and also wet from the Rocky Mountains all the way into California. The cold weather - it has been confined to us.

The real warm weather has been in the Southeast part of the United States and Alaska, and the extreme western portions of the Pacific.

As we go forward into the month of March, there are not a whole lot of changes as we end the month. We still have the same Northern branch, we still have the Southern branch, but what gets interesting is as we go into April the Northern branch is a little bit less enhanced.

That means the really cold weather shouldn't be impacting us quite as much. But the Southern is still active and this continues on into May. That means storm after storm could have a huge impact on what we're thinking, and that means as well we could have mid-latitude cyclones that will be bringing in dry lines, warm fronts, cold fronts, that set up for severe weather.

That severe weather is not what we want to see. So our spring forecast is for cooler than normal weather - just slightly and also unfortunately a higher chance for precipitation.

That also means that unfortunately we do have risks that are very high for tornadoes, wind and flooding. Our hail risk is moderate to high.