Mark Jarvis with the National Weather Service in Louisville says the frequent bouts of damaging weather are indeed coming fast and furious lately.
"When you have events every two weeks, it seems like, wow, this is crazy. Normally, we don't have events every two weeks. Severe weather is a little bit more spread out, but not this year," he says.
Despite the successive nature of these events, Jarvis pins the blame largely on La Niña, a climate pattern that can have global impacts on weather and typically lasts between nine months and a year — though it can go on longer. It just so happens that, right now, it's setting the stage for repeated extreme weather flareups.
"When you have the La Niña conditions and you come out of it during the following spring, it's usually fairly active. And the weather pattern itself has just been fairly active for storms across the Plains and into the Midwest and into the Ohio Valley," he explains.
That much was expected, Jarvis says, even if the disasters are keeping Kentucky on edge more than usual.
Still, insurance companies are noticing. NPR reports the cost of homeowners insurance is skyrocketing in states where large outbreaks of tornadoes are becoming more common.
The above-average number of tornadoes in the Midwest doesn't necessarily mean 2025 will repeat indefinitely, and research is ongoing as scientists try to figure out if climate change is contributing to a greater frequency of larger tornado outbreaks.
Regarding Friday's EF-2 tornado in Washington County — about an hour southwest of Lexington — the weather wasn't out-of-bounds considering the forecast. With no weather sirens in the remote area and no major widespread weather front leading to conference calls, it caught some by surprise.
But Jarvis says warnings did go out.
"The forecast did indicate that we could have showers and thunderstorms overnight, and there was a low risk of severe weather. It wasn't exactly zero, but it wasn't exactly high either. So this is one of those cases where you say that there's, you know, a 5% chance of a tornado somewhere in Kentucky overnight, boom, you got it," he says.
So what's next?
While the threat normally starts to diminish in early June, he says conditions could be ripe again soon.
"This pattern is going to continue," he cautions. "We're going to get dry over the weekend. And getting into next week, the pattern is gonna reload again, and you're going to see a lot of severe weather out in the Plains and and eventually moving into the Midwest. So I think we'll probably be active here in another week or week-and-a-half, or at least have thunderstorms around that could produce severe weather."