Over the past couple of years whenever graphics like the one below were put up I would get all excited about chasing and usually end up sitting in a parking lot somewhere in NE Okla reading AFD's about how explosive development will occur at any moment only to end up going home after seeing nothing and seeing Storm Reports showing a bunch of tornados in Kansas. Will be interesting to see how this one pans out.

With April coming to an end and no chance at storms until May first I wanted to post some tornado numbers. In the month of April a total of 167 tornado's were reported so far with 3 being in Oklahoma, 14 states including Virgina and North Carolina reported more tornado's than Oklahoma and the graphic below does not include the mini outbreak over on the east coast yesterday. So far this year there have been 673 tornado's which is almost 300 above the average up to this point in the year. Oklahoma usually averages 15.5 up to this point in the year and is below average up to this point.

Reference Links:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/tornadodata/ok/monthlyannual.php
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/torn/monthlytornstats.html

Edit: Just noticed a few hours after my post that the link to the OUN tornados had been updated and jumped from 4 to 18. Most of these are probably damage survey tornado which is why they are not showing up on SPC report pages.

Pulled the trigger on one of the longest slight risk chases I have ever done. With not much going on around here and several quite days until Thur I decided to drive to Abilene and one of the main reasons I did was because convection was almost certain which is usually not the case with a moderate or high risk. Storms fired as planned and I played them for a while making sure no tornado's would drop, a few tornado warnings were issued though. Salvaged the chase by staying in Abilene and caught some great lightning video which was a must with the price of gas right now!

Decided to go ahead and give SW Kansas a shot yesterday and it was a huge clear sky bust. So far this year I have chased 5-6 moderate risk setups and have not seen much but with the number or severe storms we have had in NE Okla it is not really that disappointing. Another slight risk here today and I am pretty sure it will end up being better than any of those moderate risk I chased this year. Still looks like April will end up being the slowest month tornado wise of the year but northern Kansas was finally able to get some red dots logged (7) and almost passed Oklahoma (8) for the year.
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/online/monthly/2008_annual_summary.html

Edit 12:00pm:
Front blasted through way to fast and it looks like SE Okla is not even and option at this point. Looks like it will be quite until the first of May around here now.

As far as April tornado's go, Oklahoma has not see much except for a report way down south near the border on April 9th. As far as storms go I think the Tulsa area has seen more this year that all of 05,06 and 07 combined. I have gotten hail video in NE Oklahoma 5 times this year and actually caught AM and PM storms yesterday with hail. Today there is a conditional setup way out in west Texas and if this year had been like the last three I would be making that long drive out there, but with the storms we have had and the chance at more here today I can skip that setup out west and not be to concerned with missing anything. Eventually one of these setups here in the plains is going to have to produce some tornado's but so far this year out of everything I have not seen any tornado video's and only 2 or 3 actual photographs of tornado's. At this point I will be happy just staying home until one of these setups do produce an then that may put that drive back into me to make those 3 to 6 hour drives, but so far this year anything west of the Arkansas border has not been worth those long drives.

So far April has produced better than average severe weather here in Tulsa but I missed most of it chasing higher risk areas to the south and west that produced about the same thing that Tulsa got. Below is a chart showing storm reports so far this year and by looking at it you can see April has about equaled January as far as total reports and with only 10 days left it does not look like it is going to beat it by much. In fact unless there are 60+ tornado reports over the next ten days Jan,Feb and Mar are going to beat April in that catagory which is really strange!

Did not spend a lot of time looking at these setups because they usually either go to crap or don't produce in Oklahoma but the models are showing the possibilty of several setups here next week. Pretty sure by Monday AFD's will be coming out talking about long track cyclic supercells producing multiple wedge tornado's, I will just be hoping for some lightning,wind and hail and will just be happy if we can get that!

Kansas has yet to see anything wx wise so far this year so I would expect something should come up over the next week or two. Right now the GFS is showing a classic cold core setup but it is still a few days out so it might change.

None of the events over the last week really lived up to the hype and yesterday was the biggest flop of all. Looks like it will be quite for about a week and then the models look like Armageddon type forecast will be forthcoming.
Yesterday I drove to Pine Bluff Ark and below is the type stuff I was reading while trying to talk myself into going ahead and starting my drive back to Tulsa at 2pm yesterday.

MEANWHILE...CINH HAS BECOME MINIMAL OVER
 MOST OF ERN AR...AND SHOULD ERODE GRADUALLY EWD INTO WRN TN.  SUCH
 LARGE BUOYANCY/SHEAR COMBINATIONS...AND PROBABILITY OF RELATIVELY
 DISCRETE STORMS -- INDICATE POTENTIAL IS INCREASING NOT JUST FOR
  TORNADOES BUT FOR A FEW TO BECOME SIGNIFICANT/DAMAGING...GIVEN
 SUSTAINED/CYCLIC SUPERCELLS.

I did finally call it a day at 3pm and made it home by 7pm so that was not to bad and while it did stink that nothing happened it would have been worse to be sitting home and watch it go nuts, which it probably would have had I not gone.

That is how long I have been up! Drove out to western Oklahoma for the usual Moderate Risk Non-event and then when I got back to Tulsa a bunch of storms went up so I shot a bunch of video and did a bunch of streaming for the station. Managed to get one lightning shot although it is overexposed:

Looks like two more chase this week and the best part is they will not be in Oklahoma so there is a pretty good chance I could see a tornado.

This upcoming week looks like we will finally find out if it Oklahoma is still part of tornado ally or if mother nature has decided to completely remove it, if she has not already. So far this year there has been a record number of tornado's at over 500 but Oklahoma has only recorded 5-10 depending on how you count tornado's and I have only seen photo/video of one so far this year. There have been two or three setups this year that were supposed to produce tornado's but in the end Oklahoma ended up with only one that was a damage survey (no photo/video) of it even though 100's of chasers were on it. Needless to say Oklahoma has not lost it draw as a tornado state because this week hundreds of chasers from across the country will flock here with these upcoming setups and I will be out there to, it is almost like Oklahoma is a pressure cooker that has been building up over the last couple of years and every chaser does not want to take the chance of not being here when it finally does explode. Monday and Thursday look to be the big days right now with Tuesday and Wednesday also providing storms. I really don't wish for Oklahoma to have the big bad outbreak of tornado's with a bunch of stuff getting tore up like some of the eastern states have had this year but it would be nice to see a photogenic tornado out in a field somewhere. Below is the tornado count so far this year with 516 and looking at Oklahoma there is 5. Will there be any more red dots in Oklahoma after this week? Probably. Will there be any photo/video of tornado's from Oklahoma this week? Based on what I have seen the last few years I would say doubtful.

So far this year my livecam has only been active when I am streaming to the station and I only stream to them when there is something of interest. So 95% of the time it will not be active since I don't what to stream video of me just driving around. I also have concerns that any web traffic could effect the stream to the station so at some point I will probably remove the link entirely.

Chase Report from yesterday(short version):Chased some storms.
Chase Report from yesterday(long version):Chased some storms in eastern Oklahoma.

Forecast(short version):another chase on Monday.
Forecast(long version):another chase on Monday in Oklahoma!

It almost feels like I packed up and moved to western Kansas with all of the storms we have had and chances of storms over the next two days! Tonights stuff will be hailers and hopefully some lightning and tomorrow could be interesting but like the other day AM stuff could fire and mess it all up. Even if the AM stuff does go it still should be interesting the further south you go into Texas but I am not sure I want to drive that far with chances of storms around here.