Rough weather is hitting earlier in Spring of '09

If it seems as though severe spring storm season is starting earlier each year, a renowned climatologist believes you’re on track. Doctor Ken Dewey is a professor and climatologist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was one of the presenters during an annual storm spotter training workshop, held yesterday at the Saline Center.
Dewey says severe weather earlier than normal can bring more intense storms. Three of the last five years, early season strong storms and tornadoes in have occurred in Oklahoma and Kansas. Nebraska got a taste of the early spring severe weather with tornadoes one week ago, in Lancaster County and areas toward Omaha.
While Dewey leads a team of students who are storm chasers, he says it was too risky last week to send them out. However, that didn’t stop Dewey himself from venturing out. He dropped south from highway two, to Hickman, when the storms were passing across southern Lancaster County.
The professor said last week’s storms are an example of why it’s very dangerous for members of the public to be out in a very bad storm, because tornadoes don’t always show themselves, out the back side of a storm. And, in this case, the thunderstorms were doing what Dewey calls re-cycling, generating a tornado, collapsing, then generating a tornado again.
Thanks to Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice