When I see over a million acres of the Texas Panhandle burning in the first week of March, I start to wonder if the spring season is beginning to tell us the quiet part out loud.
And here we are again, another risk for severe weather across portions of the Southern Plains, accompanied by a critical risk for wildfires across New Mexico and west Texas thanks to hot, dry, windy conditions across the region.
Global forecast models are already picking up on a potentially eastward displaced dryline during the spring months in 2024, and an active storm track through the Plains and Midwest could lead to a lot of days with similar critical fire weather conditions and blowing dust across much of New Mexico and west Texas.
The Caprock is one of the best places on Earth to observe supercells & tornadoes, but I worry that much of the stormy good fortune in this part of Tornado Alley may have been spent during that extended run in May-June 2023 when storm chasers made semi-permanent homes in Clovis, New Mexico.
We're going to see a bit of a pattern reset in mid to late March, and it's entirely within the realm of possibilities that we see the first few systems slowly lumber through the Southern Plains with heavy precipitation eradicating these concerns... at the moment though this feels like one of those instances where we're peering into the future looking for answers when one of the more obvious pieces of the story is already unfolding.