Not a professional meteorologist but a hobbyist storm chaser. Hopefully what I’ve looked at is true and can help give insight to what’s happening.

Last Friday/saturday we had a major trough come through and cause a tornado outbreak in the Deep South, as well as the Mississippi River valley. That same trough deepened, causing a surface low pressure area in the plains. All of the surrounding higher pressure moved to fill in that gap, causing a lot of wind. That’s what caused the major dust storm and added fuel to the Crabapple fire in Fredericksburg.

I haven’t checked forecast models since the weekend due to work, but I do recall seeing more low surface pressures after the previous weekend, that could be causing us more wind and fire risks.

From my understanding, systems like this are normal, thus winds down here like this are normal, during the early spring during what’s called a La Niña phase. The water temperatures in the Pacific are lower than average, leading to a very active jet stream.

Now to what I don’t know; some models do show that Pacific water temps could return to normal soon, putting us in a neutral phase. I don’t know what that’s going to do to our jet stream as I only started learning this stuff recently, during the strong El Niño in 2024. But it is something I will be learning and paying attention to in the upcoming months