ENID — Forecasters say a wetter-than-usual winter and a jet stream ripping over the part of the country known as “Tornado Alley” could lead to an active spring — perhaps starting with the strong twister that nicked a small western Oklahoma town Monday night.

“It’s time to get ready,” Michelann Ooten of Oklahoma De-partment of Em-ergency Manage-ment said Tues-day as she surveyed damage from a storm that destroyed five homes and tore the roofs off several others in Hammon.

The nation typically will see 70-100 tornadoes by early March, but only 42 had been reported until Monday night’s Oklahoma tornado. There was only one tornado nationwide during February.

“No one would argue that we’re going to see a pretty good increase in the number of severe storms,” said Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist with the national Storm Prediction Center in Norman. “But each year’s a little different. The number, magnitude, number of days are all very tentative at this point.”

In the short term, storms will be generated and fueled by the usual tornado trigger — Gulf moisture colliding with storm systems driven by the jet stream.

In a few months, parts of the Plains that had above-normal precipitation during the winter could see storms fueled by the moisture stored within plants and the ground.

“Transpiration is usually a component later in the springtime. We won’t have that for a little while longer,” Carbin said.

Monday’s twister occur-red when a low-pressure system in the Pacific Northwest kicked a strong storm system out of the Rocky Mountains and into the southern Plains.

“There are all sorts of connections,” Carbin said. “The atmosphere is a dynamic thing. You can’t really pin it down to one descriptor.”

The slow start to the season is no sign later storms will be stronger, weaker or non-existent.

“That pretty much tells us nothing,” said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Lab.

Brooks said if weather conditions that caused the Hammon storm — abundant moisture at the surface and a low pressure system in the Northwest knocking the jet stream into Tornado Alley — are in place when the warm weather arrives, the upcoming tornado season might be ferocious.

“If we had this pattern in two months, that would mean something very different than we have now,” he said.

Mike Honigsberg, director of Enid/Garfield County Emergency Management, shares the same opinion.

“I think we’re going to have an active season,” he said. “In memory, last time that I recall we had a cooler-than-normal winter and a wetter-than-normal winter, we had a very active spring.”

KOCO chief meteorologist Rick Mitchell said there is some support for Honigs-berg’s theory.

“There are some studies that have pointed out that if you have a wet autumn and a wet winter, then your spring is more active,” said Mitchell.

While there are some hints to what kind of tornado season is coming, it is impossible to know for sure.

Mitchell said a more active spring would mean more thunderstorms and more thunderstorms create “more opportunity” for tornadoes.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he said.

“It’s just a feeling, I hope I’m wrong,” Honigsberg said. “It’ll be interesting to see how it is going to pan out.”

The only twister reported nationwide in February was in a San Joaquin Valley oilfield in California two weekends ago. A year ago, there were 36 February tornadoes — and the year’s deadliest was Feb. 10, 2009, at Lone Grove, where eight people died in a storm with winds estimated at 170 mph.

Last year, 1,156 tornadoes were reported nationwide and 21 people were killed, according to the Storm Prediction Center. In 2008, there were 1,691 tornadoes and 126 tornado-related deaths.



Staff writer Bridget Nash and The Associated Press contributed to this story.