Hi Bon,

Unfortunately, I have slightly more experience with persistent drought than a lot of y'all in central and NE OK because, even in a normal rainfall year, it is common for us to have several weeks of summer drought simply because our soils do not retain moisture well and some years rain doesn't fall often enough. It used to drive me insane to have drought when everyone else was dumping inches and inches of rain out of their rain gauges, but I just had to learn to live with it. : ) Either that, or I actually am insane, and if that is the case, now y'all know why. In my county, because of the soils we have, it only takes three weeks to go from comfortably wet to abnormally dry, which is the first stage of drought recognized by the U. Sl Drought Monitor.

First a comment on Larry's soil and drought conditions. I understand Larry's situation completely because the same thing happens to him that happens to me. One week you cannot get into the garden because it is a muddy, mucky swampy mess and the next week it is bone dry. This is because of the nature of our clay soils. Once they get dry, it is hard to get them to absorb water so rainfall and irrigation just rolls right off. Anyone with dense, compacted clay has the same issue, and the more dense and compacted their clay, the more it is a problem. Amending soil can fix a small area....like the area where you grow things....but if thousands of acres around you are exceptionally dry, you cannot do anything about that and your land cracks and shifts because the larger land mass is doing so.

As far as the drought monitor is concerned: it applies to broad-scale conditions over a large area, like a county or region. We live in and garden in small scale conditions. Because soil can vary so much....mine varies every few feet in some instances...and because rain does not fall evenly, any person can find themselves with conditions that are much better or much worse than what is indicated on the drought monitor. If you have received much more rain than your mesonet station or much less, your soil's moisture levels and local pond or lake levels may be quite different that you'd expect based on the drought monitor reports.

With regards to the drought monitor itself, what I have observed is that, as a gardener, I always feel like we are desperately dry and deeply in drought several weeks---even a month or more---before the U. S. Drought Monitor even begins to show that we are "Abnormally Dry". By the time they have us at "Severe Drought" or "Extreme Drought", my water bills have gotten outrageously high and I have dead plants despite watering. We have seen this same thing with Jay's area the last few years. It takes the U. S. Drought Monitor eons to start showing drought in his area. By the time they finally start showing his area is "Abnormally Dry" it seems like they ought to be showing "Extreme Drought".

So, while I think the U. S. Drought Monitor is useful for understanding broad-scale conditions over a very large area, I don't know that it necessarily tells us a great deal about our own local conditions. That is always a problem with any sort of weather recording map, though. You know, suppose your county's mesonet station has recorded 25" of rain this year, but you've only had 12" of rainfall. Well, no matter what the mesonet shows, your garden would be existing in drought conditions even if, for the rest of your county, on paper, it doesn't look like those conditions exist.

With regard to this year's drought, I haven't linked this week's drought monitor and will do so now, but from what I remember from looking at it earlier this week, the drought continues to erode from east to west. Parts of OK, especially after the last two weeks, are far removed from drought, but in more western areas of the state, there's plenty of folks still in various stages of drought, including extreme and exceptional drought.

There's a old saying here in this region that "it takes a flood to end a drought". Even though I grew up in hot and dry Texas, I never really understood the meaning of that phrase until I moved to Oklahoma, the land of extreme weather. I understand it now and I agree with it. When you return to normal, average or typical rainfall after a period of prolonged drought, it still isn't enough to put extra moisture in the ground to bring you out of drought. You have to have repeated rounds of extra-heavy, higher-than-average rainfall to even have a chance of really replenishing not just the moisture levels in the soil, but to refill ponds, lakes and underground aquifers. For much of this state, especially the eastern half of it, that is occurring this year.

In 2003 and again in 2005, we had what I thought were pretty severe drought years here in our region. Then we had drought again in 2008. I remember a news story during the 2008 drought where some ranchers in Carter County, one county north of where I live, said that in 2008 they still had creeks and stock ponds that never had returned to normal after the 2005-06 drought. Think about that. Three years later, and with incredibly heavy rainfall and flooding in 2007, they still were so dry in 2008 that their ponds never had refilled. That helped me understand that true drought recovery can be a very slow process. Even more than that is that our pond isn't a pond any more. Prior to the mid-2000s, it never went completely dry and was full of fish. We have a fishing dock that we used to use. Now? Fish are a distant memory and we haven't fished off the dock since sometime prior to 2005. The dock sits there surrounded by dry ground for roughly 11 months out of the year, and even if heavy rainfall puts water in the pond, it just sits there for a few days before it either evaporates or soaks into the ground.

We have had some persistently wet and stormy years before. The worst one I remember was either 1996 or 1997 when the heavy rainfall continued all summer. I lived in Texas then, but I remember a lot of flooding, constantly wet soil and a Fourth of July when it was foggy, light misty rain fell all day and our high temperature was in the 70s. We had a houseful of kids, including my brother's family, with a bunch of fireworks they couldn't use since fireworks don't do well in constant drizzle. Here in OK, 2001 and 2004 were delightfully wet, but I don't remember as much severe weather. In 2007 we had extremely heavy persistent rain and flooding in much of the state that persisted at least into July, but there again, I don't remember as much violent weather.

What is happening to our weather and climate? Who the heck knows. For a long time, I listened to various political factions argue about global warming, whether or not it was occurring, and whether or not the changes being seen were related to mankind or were just a normal climatic cycle. It was, and still is, a highly charged political issue. In general, conservative politicians deny climate change is occurring and more liberal politicians believe it is occurring and believe mankind is causing it. Because I dislike the way the two main political parties have politicized the issue, I have tried to ignore it. However.....

Ever since about 2005, I have felt like our weather has gone crazy and our climate is changing. It isn't one specific incident, but just that I see things happen in my local area in a way since about 2005 that I didn't notice before. It is a combination of a fairly subtle set of changes. Each change alone might not even be noticeable, but put them all together and I have realized my climate that I garden in has become more extreme. It seems we spend a lot more time in drought, then we spend time with extremely excessive rainfall and flooding and waterlogged soils. Our last freezes do not correlate well to the 30-year-average last freeze or last frost or last killing freeze data on the record books. Theoretically, your real-life experiences never match the averages since averages are, by definition, both extremes averaged together over decades. However, when an area like mine whose last average frost date is March 29th repeatedly, year after year, has frosts until the first week in May, something is wrong. Either the data is wrong, or my climate is changing. It is the same thing with rain...something is wrong. Through 2004 and even the first half of 2005, we had fairly regular rainfall. We might have a period of drought in roughly July and August, but then rain returned in autumn and filled up the ponds again. Now? The ponds can sit empty for almost a year, fill up and even overflow with torrential rainfall, and then be empty again a a month or 2 months later and stay empty for months or years. We've somehow lost the consistency we once had in rainfall and it seems like it has become basically an all-or-none type situation. This disturbs me.

For the last few years, I have read Dr. Jeff Masters' blog at his Weather Underground website. When I first started reading it, he wasn't writing about climate change as much as he does now. I would read what he wrote about climate change and let it go in one ear and out the other because I had a closed mind on this subject and wasn't ready to concede that my closed mind was wrong. However, as my local weather seemed to be becoming more extreme, I begin to understand his point. Scientists who study the climate have told us for years that our climate is changing and that, as it is changing, we are seeing more extreme weather. I now believe them because my climate is becoming more extreme since about 2005-06 than it was prior to that. We rarely get nice gentle thunderstorms any more. Either we get dinky little amounts of rain like a tenth of an inch here and a quarter of an inch there, or we get torrential rainfall and flooding. I remember sitting out on the covered patio in the early 2000s watching normal thundershowers put down a lot of rain....and we'd have some wind and some thunder and lightning and hail maybe once a year...and it was pea sized or maybe nickle sized. I miss those gentle and relaxing storms. Now it seems like a deluge or a drought and rarely much in between.

One thing scientists have long predicted was that as global warming or climate change occurred, our weather would become more extreme---even wildly extreme. Is that what is happening now? I think so. I think that 30 or 40 years from now, people will look back at the first decade or two of this century and realize that this is when climate change and its affect on our local and regional weather patterns really became obvious. I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am.

Even with climate change occurring, I still find it hard to decide if I believe it is caused by the activity of mankind or if it is a normal cycle in the earth's atmosphere that has occurred for centuries. What I do know is that the weather I garden in now seems much more extreme than what I gardened in during previous decades. I realize that locally-observed conditions by one gardener in their location doesn't mean climate change is occurring worldwide. But, in my case, it definitely indicates my specific climate that I garden in has changed. I feel like we see really wild and abnormal swings from one extreme to another.

Back in the winter months, the mighty Mississippi River was so dry that low water levels were impeding river traffic and they were digging and dynamiting to remove some of the river bottom in order to keep at least one channel within the river open to boat traffic. Now the river is flooding. A flooding Mississippi River is nothing new, historically. What seems unusual to me now is for it to swing from too dry/empty in January or February to overflowing and flooding in May...or even April. I just don't think this is normal. I think maybe it is our new normal.

Oklahoma always has been a region with extreme weather and with extremely changeable weather. Are we seeing more extreme weather or more changeable weather than before? I believe we are, but then I have only lived here for 15 years. Maybe someone who has lived here for decades longer than I have doesn't feel like this extreme weather is anything new. We always have had the same general weather here that we have now, but it seems like it swings from one extreme to another more rapidly than it used to.

Dr. Masters' explanation of how many factors, like how the melting of the polar ice contributes to more extreme weather, has taught me a lot. It helps me understand why the jet stream patterns, for example, often seem unusual compared to in the past, and how those changes in jet stream patterns contribute to crazily extreme weather.

Long after I started believing I was observing the effects of climate change on our property and was hearing about those effects occurring worldwide, my husband was not on board. We didn't argue about it or anything---but it was just that I believed our climate is changing and he didn't A couple of years ago, every time we had some extreme weather he began saying "our climate is changing". It is hard to deny what is occurring when you see your climate changing right in front of your face.

I didn't write all about climate change in order to provoke debate about whether it is or is not occurring, but merely to explain that I feel like it is occurring merely based on what I observe. Scientists and politicians can argue forever about whether it is occurring or not, whether mankind's activities contribute to it, and whether or not we are having more extreme weather. That's fine. For me, as a gardener, what matters to me is what I observe and what effect is has on my garden and landscape, and I am observing crazier weather.

The month of May likely always has been Oklahoma's biggest month for tornadoes. This has to do with our position on the continent and the way different weather patterns collide over this region. That hasn't changed. However, it seems like we get stuck in a persistent pattern that brings a lot of severe weather and this last few weeks that certainly has been true. I don't know enough about Oklahoma's tornado history to say whether we are seeing more of them and are seeing more extreme ones, but to me it seems like we are.

Dawn

I have 4 times your experience in Oklahoma weather. Although the drought cycle is not new according to my highly educated friend who commercially farm, I think the weather is more extreme also. A friend who is a retired firechief believes that the increase in the intensity of the May 20 Moore tornado has to do with the increased population density in that area. The great the population the more concrete and heat retaining surfaces. The more heat, the more fuel for the tornado. That's an interesting idea, at least. You may find a website informational. It is tornadohistoryproject.com. it tracks tornados throughout the US for ths past 60 years or so. Of course, that is not long enough to know if this is normal earth cycles or man assisted climate change. I will certainly start following Dr. Master's site. Whether it's ice age long cycles or a new cycle, I don't know. My Dad, who has 101 years of experience with Oklahoma weather says he has always seen extreme temperature and rainfall variations, and doesn't believe this is manmade climate change. Our weather has many extremes, but I have recently tried to get back into gardening,or st least improve my landscape, and the last 2 years have been more challenging than I remember from 30 years ago.

Dawn, saying "thank you" is just not enough.

If I ever needed to act like an eager newbie sitting at the feet of a gardening giant absorbing secret techniques, you're the one I'd listen to and I tenderly appreciate you responding to my questions or to the questions of anybody who asks on this forum either from Oklahoma or from across the nation.

If it were due and possible I'd be watering your garden daily and doing the dirty work for you in exchange for your wonderful ideas. Yet. I need not do that because you are so generous.

May you be blessed richly and rewarded heavily for your willingness to bestow knowledge on other gardeners without compensation. ♥

Human instinct is as important as weights and measurements though scientists would argue the matter. I consider it important though not the end-all. The alarm from my instincts have been set off. The excitement over the last two weeks provided something this storm-loving Oklahoma native has never known: Sheer terror from not understanding.

I did not understand why that storm just sat there. I did not understand why, given the innately small size of that wall cloud why it was rotating and acting as mean as a half-mile wall cloud would. It was different. And that says a lot about tornadoes whose natures are known for their unpredictable temperaments. Yet, unless I speak with someone well-versed it is hard for me to determine if it is a genuine alarm or just one noticed for the first time.

Except for that which is inherent to my conservative nature politics is thrown in the ditch. That includes small town politics, too. Responsibilities aside, politics are politics. Still, anyone can claim to toss politics or even "worldliness" out the window, but as long as we're alive we make decisions that play into those factors every day. There are those who can honestly say their decisions do not impact politics or "the world" but they are wiping their rear ends with something other than toilet paper if they can truly make that claim.

Politics is wholly useless, ripe with corruption and contains too many falsehoods to be usefully reliable except for lining the pockets of those who spout allegations of any caliber. I mean no offense to anyone related or intentionally involved in politics. Someone has to do the job and I know some actually "try". It isn't the politicians as much as it is the nature of the beast that is so destructive.

Science is rational, but the outcome of any study - like you mention - is wholly reliant upon the variables used to obtain that outcome. Miss one variable and the entire study is Kablooee. In most cases, it is not shot down, but wholly unreliable tests and the results of are readily accepted in a blind lock-step fashion by peoples lacking critical thinking skills or those that are just too busy to weigh the facts. I do not think "laziness" is as much to play as most would play considering the vast amounts of information is available on any given subject in our time. Think how easy it would be for one of us to step back in time fifty years ago and be considered a genius from the sheer wealth of information we have. Still, people in those times would be more likely to watch the outcome of our actions opposed to becoming enamored by a wealth of information or "coolness" (vanity) as we do today. As they say "actions speak louder than words".

Add to this scientific mix the inherent nature of politics (or mankind) and the entire kablooee can be forged into a self-serving agenda - such as the likes of global climate. There are facts that continually crop for climate change but they are skewed into something entirely different for an agenda or agendas from one or many groups looking at things differently and for different reasons of which we will never know because of the sheer complexity of what makes people tick.

Herein lies the need for me to bother asking you, to risk seeming weak or foolish in order to obtain what I deem as "gold", a real expert gardener's opinion on Oklahoma's weather.

Screw the scientists for a minute. I want to know what one well-rounded individual with common sense and the ability to include legitimate facts mired with a long successful gardening experience has to say about the matter! And before you scoff thinking of your failures: If you can so many tomatoes it makes me tired just reading about it, then you are definitely successful!

Your writing tells me I need to delve deeper into the scientific facts, to learn the various jet streams and all the scientific data relating to what creates our local climate.

Frustration of honing in on the real facts aside, I think it will be imperative to know these things. And how about wicked weather climates? Except for El Nino and El Nina, I haven't a clue where to start, but those might be it. Your writing tells me a rain gauge should move up on my list of priorities (lol). It reminds me I forget that I am on the edge of two different zones. This is not the first time I have noticed my little spot on the earth to be far different from the over-all statistics for either zone. It's like a little world apart. Your writing also tells me to send prayers for you and Larry and that parts of my "yarden" are just like yours and also that I should be grateful for those parts that are not. Hence, the confusion!

What concerned me the most about the slew of recent tornadoes was that our local weather center was posting on facebook the various sightings and technological readings minute by minute and it heavily indicated they cannot keep up with them all!

I realized we cannot rely on them wholly as they suggest. It isn't so much that the technology is insufficient or their own knowledge incapable or their staff insufficient in numbers as is the reality there were far too many wall-clouds producing tornadoes than they could cover across the entire state occurring at the same time.

THAT IS DIFFERENT.

While everyone was focusing on Moore, Oklahoma - including the meteorologists - tornadoes were popping down everywhere. And how many times did Moore get hit over the course of the last two weeks? An incredible amount of times though only one caused severe damage.

The wall cloud hanging over our house was not being watched closely by the meteorologist. They were following the more intense one that headed in a different direction: rightfully so.

They would have patted me on the back for diving into the shelter despite the void of their warning. Still, the brevity of this reality and the consciousness that these storms has strengthened over time slaps me in the face. Something's different and it terrifies me.

So, I agree with you even though I have not been watching the sky for thirty years for the sake of my garden.

And I noticed, particularly, the nerve of these storms. The one that hovered over our house? It was small. Tiny, in many respects and normally something to ignore, but it was truly nasty with 75mph cloud movement while others at a stand still containing an ominous nature like I have never seen of small storms before. Bigger storms? Heck, yeah.. But small storms with the nature of a mile-wide tornado? Unheard of except for "dead man walking" known to spew two smaller funnels at an F5 intensity lasting for only a few minutes consisting of a storm not sufficiently large to carry itself for several miles. Terrifying!

But who of you has spent an entire two weeks looking out for tornadoes? This is new to me. A day? Yeah. Two days? Absolutely. A terrorizing watch over the course of a week? Rarely. But two weeks (and counting)? Never have I.

deb4tune;

Thank you so much for your added input. What you wrote makes sense - about the elevated heat patterns because of man-made constructions.

I have noticed a pattern in the multitude of storms that pass through Oklahoma city before coming to us. Oklahoma City is likely to weaken the storms! While Oklahoma City suffers, they have caused our area to receive a great deal of GOOD moisture by breaking down its strength and reducing it to a average storm or sweet soaking rain.

The last storm seemed to be aggravated by the presence of Oklahoma City which enlivens your theory. I am absolutely convinced of what you speak in terms of convection and other forms of modified air currents. It MUST make an impact somehow not unlike trees slowing down the winds and erosion but on a larger scale. Right?

And your Dad? Thank you for enlightening us with your Dad's opinion. Maybe he's right. Maybe we just analyze too much and because we haven't experienced it before we think it's new; typical behavior of the young ones, huh?

I got a chuckle after reading your own input of the last two years. I began gardening in June of 2011. I, literally, started seedlings that month. I picked a heck of a time to start gardening!!! LOL!

No matter what, I've certainly learned a lot and will continue to do so.

Blessings to all.

Deb, First, I think it is terrific you still have your dad! It is amazing to think he has lived on this earth 101 years.

I do think we have to take into consideration the heat island effect from all the concrete too, as well as the fact that population centers have grown a lot.

The weather here seems to get more and more extreme all the time. I grew up in Texas just 80 miles south of where I live now and I lived there all my life until we moved here, and am used to the wild weather swings from one extreme to another, but they just seem more frequent and wilder now. Dr. Masters posted a great blog entry yesterday on the El Reno-OKC tornadoes. I'll link it below.

When I think back 30 years, I remember mostly milder weather too. We'd have severe thunderstorms and an occasional tornado near Fort Worth, but rainfall didn't seem like it always came with real severe weather like it so often does now.

Bon, Tornadoes always have scared me. My dad's family survived one just one county catty-corner to the SW of my county in the 1920s. It picked up their little farmhouse and moved it about 50'. They all were in the storm cellar by then, having seen the tornado coming and jumping up from the dinner table to run for the nearby storm cellar. He took us to the farm in the 1970s and showed us the house and the cellar and I never forgot that. Then he survived one near Fort Worth in the 1980s by getting out of the car and lying down in the ditch, and my brother was a college student living in Wichita Falls when they had their big tornado in about 1979. My niece and nephew sought shelter in their high school's band shelter when the Fort Worth tornado hit their school on its way to do much more damage a few miles away in downtown Fort Worth a few years ago. I'd like for our family history with tornadoes to end right there.

Weather forecasting is a very inexact science in one way because so many factors come together that everything changes constantly. So, while the NWS forecasters can tell us, with a high degree of accuracy, just which days are likely to have all the conditions come together for severe weather, they cannot tell us precisely where the storms will form or which way they'll move. Still, they have us ready for the storm initiation to begin and then they tell us as quickly as they can where the storms are forming and which way they are moving. While many tornadoes generally move from southwest to northeast, not all of them do. Look at the tracks from the Friday night tornadoes....they are non-traditional, and the first one kept changing direction in an atypical manner, which is one reason that I think so many storm chasers got caught in the storm.

I know this is hard to believe, but I really didn't pay much attention to the weather, other than checking our forecast high and low, and checking to see if precip was in the forecast, until around the mid-2000s. As the weather got weirder, I started watching it more.

We have so many tools now to alert us. Icheck the SPC Convective Outlook every morning as wel as the Norman weather forecast office's website, and local media. Oh, and Weather Underground. Chris' favorite is to go to the TVN website and see where the "Live" chasers are on the map on days when there is a threat of severe weather. When he sees storm chasers are in our county, he either calls me or texts me to let me know. When he does that, I start really paying attention. If you are seeing storm chasers in your neighborhood well in advance of the issuance of even a Tornado Watch, that is a clue, and it is a clue to which I pay close attention. On Friday, many of those storm chasers were right there near where the tornado formed---and,. to me, that is an indication of how good the NWS data is----that the chasers can look at the data and know where to go. Still, they don't know how the tornadoes will behave once they form.

I cannot imagine what it is like for the forecasters and support staff during a major, multi-day tornado outbreak. It boggles my mind to think of how many tornado watches and warnings they issue on a day like that. Their stress level must be out of this world. I think they do a terrific job of warning us about severe weather, and their warnings, if heeded, save lots of lives. One problem, though, is that they are so good that people may get too relaxed and always think they'll have a 15 or 20 minute warning. The reality is that a tornado can form right over your head and you might see it before they can issue a warning on it. So, when I go outside on a day with severe weather potential I always make sure I have my cell phone and fire radio (it has the NOAA weather radio channel for our location programmed into it) with me, but I always watch the skies too.

About a half-hour before a Tornado Warning was issued for our county Thursday, we had mammatus clouds pop up right over our house. Seeing them scared me. When I saw them, I immediately came indoors and checked the NWS website and the local radar. Then I went outside and watched the supercell build up to a huge height, and I was in the yard right beside the storm cellar watching it. When a funnel cloud was spotted on the opposite side of the supercell from me, Chris sent a photo of the funnel cloud to me and I went into the cellar. He got the photo from a video live stream of a storm chaser.

A lot of negative things have been said about the behavior of some storm chasers (i.e. getting too close to the El Reno tornado, for example), and rightfully so, but the storm chasers who are Skywarn trained (and often these people are trained meteorologists like Heather and her DH) and who report what they see to the NWS are performing a valuable service by providing first-hand data about what they are seeing. To me, when I see storm chaser locations on the map and they are in my county, that's my first clue that something may be about to develop in our area. I hope that the overly-aggressive behavior of some storm chasers doesn't taint them all by association.

We have had multi-day outbreaks before, but I don't know how often they occur. This is just one of those years. We had one a few years ago too. I think it was in wither 2010 or 2011...the year of the Piedmont tornado. The NWS was issuing Tornado Warnings so fast that I couldn't keep up on posting them. I don't know how they do it as quickly as they do it when tornadoes pop up right and left. The last two weeks have been awful for central OK. I hope we get a break here for while so people in Moore and other hard-hit areas can clean up their property and get on with the business of starting over

I wonder if anyone has calculated the odds of Moore getting hit by two EF-5s in 15 years. The odds have got to be astronomical and yet it happened.

Dawn

I said I'd link this and then forgot to do so.

Here it is.

He wrote a previous blog on the Moore and Shawnee tornadoes, and you can find that listed under his previous blog posts if you want to read it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Dr. Masters' Blog on the El Reno Tornado

I was saddened to hear about the three storm chasers' deaths. I immediately assumed they were young and foolish.

NO! These were very experienced storm chasers outwitted by a devious and deceptive storm bringing to light concerns. They were Tim and Paul Samaras and their partner, Carl Young. RIP and peace for their family and friends

My view on tornadoes has permanently changed.

Thanks again, Dawn