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Kansas: 2014 shaping up as quiet tornado year

By The Associated Press - | May 20, 2014

? A weak jet stream and prevailing weather patterns suggest that this tornado season may remain quiet, forecasters said.

“You guys may not have many tornadoes left in the season,” Paul Pastelok, head of long-range planning for AccuWeather, told The Wichita Eagle.

The weak jet stream in upper levels of the atmosphere means ingredients that spawn tornadoes won’t be available, forecasters said. Once again May has been remarkably quiet for tornadoes nationwide.

Through Sunday, there had been 87 tornadoes in the U.S. in May, which is traditionally the busiest month of tornado season. That’s little more than two-thirds the number of tornadoes that occurred in the quietest May in the past four years, in 2012.

There have been only 13 tornadoes so far this season in Kansas and no deaths, according to National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center. Kansas had 58 tornadoes in 2013 season and 145 in 2012, the statistics show.

“We’re going to be a competitor for the lowest” number of tornadoes on record in the United States, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist with the NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.