Something unusual happened in Nebraska and Iowa last year — or rather, it didn’t happen. Doctor Ken Dewey is a climatologist who spent part of the weekend at a regional severe weather seminar. There were no tornadoes recorded during the month of May, typically one of the busiest months of the year for twisters in the Midwest.

Dewey says when that kind of thing happens to the weather pattern, they look for a cause, to see if it’s some of recurring cycle. In this case, he says, "It wasn’t a cycle in the sense of tornadoes up, tornadoes down — it was a cycle of drought that was affecting the cycle of tornadoes." Dewey says the dry weather’s also to blame for soaring summer temperatures last year.

Dewey says this year conditions are different. We’ve seen the temperatures swing from teens and a blizzard a couple of weeks ago to eighty-degree weather in the middle of the month. That shows us the energy’s there, and moisture has been there this winter, so Dewey says "climatologically speaking, this year will be more active than last year." While there were no tornadoes in the month of May last year, Dewey says that’s not going to happen again.