Monday nights storm spotter training at the Geary County 4-H and Senior Citizens building focused on the past years severe weather and how to prepare and spot severe weather.

Chad Omitt, Warning Coordination Meteorologist with the National Weather Service out of Topeka explained that last year was a rather slow year for tornado events in Kansas.

“We had a couple of larger tornadoes, thankfully no fatalities across the state last year,” Omitt said. “The number of tornadoes that we had was about 56 across the state. Normally we have about 80 and so it was, relatively speaking, a quiet year for tornadoes.”

The two larger tornadoes that hit Kansas were on May 28th, 2013, when an EF-3 tornado was reported near Corning and another EF-3 was reported near Bennington nearly an hour later.

Those two do not compare to the EF-5 tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, just over a week earlier that killed 24 people, including some students in an elementary school.

Omitt did say that it is hard to predict when a large tornado will hit but that this part of the states peak tornado season is the last two weeks of May and first two weeks of June.

“That’s when we really need to be on our toes, because we have the right combination of ingredients in terms of wind shear, the ingredients that we know from past events leads to stronger violent tornadoes.”

Even though we are still a couple months away from the peak season he did say that he believes we can expect 80 degree temps by the end of this month that could lead to some severe weather.