In this July 15, 2014 photo, sprinklers water a lawn in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
(Bloomberg) — The same weather pattern that made the West warm and dry and the Northeast cold and snowy has contributed to keeping the rest of the U.S. relatively free of tornadoes so far this year.
In the first two months of 2015, about 20 tornadoes occurred, compared with a 10-year average of 130, said Greg Carbin, a warning coordination meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. And as of Monday there had been none in March, he said.
“We’re now in really new territory, as far as the last 60 years,” Carbin said by telephone. “We have never got this late into March without one tornado reported somewhere, and we have had zero.”
The whole thing has turned out to be a silver lining in an otherwise dark pattern that has put the West on the threshold of a fourth year of drought and left the East waiting for spring mercifully to arrive.
The last time March was this quiet was 1969, when the first tornado didn’t appear until the 23rd. Only four tornado watches have been issued in 2015, while 52 are typical by mid-March, the center said. Multiple tornadoes can occur in a watch area.
