Wichita ? While Kansas already has recorded more tornadoes this year than the state’s yearly average, tornado activity through May has been relatively quiet nationally.

Oklahoma recorded no tornadoes in May, the heart of tornado season, for the first time since record-keeping began in 1950.

After a record-setting year of 124 tornadoes in 2004, Kansas logged more than 65 through May, higher than the state’s yearly average of 53 through the same period. About half of those have touched down in the western third of the state.

“We’re not running all that far behind last year’s pace, but it does seem slow,” said Chance Hayes, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Wichita.

The counties in southeastern Kansas covered by the Wichita office have recorded 19 tornadoes this year. Eight short-lived twisters appeared over the weekend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said 382 tornadoes touched down in the United States through Thursday, compared with 718 through May 2003 and 696 through May 2004.

This year’s relative lack of tornadoes is caused by what some forecasters are calling the James Bay Low, a huge dome of air anchored near James Bay in Canada. The warm, moist air from the south that usually collides with cool air from the north to create tornadoes hasn’t happened because the dome pushed the jet stream farther east this spring. Forecasters say that has stopped air from the gulf from reaching the Great Plains in large amounts.

The past two years have been the busiest ever in the U.S., with 1,817 tornadoes topping the record by 400 in 2004. Over a seven-day period in 2003, 313 tornadoes hit 19 states and killed more than 40 people, setting the record for the largest one-week flurry of tornadoes since record-keeping began in 1950.

But Hayes isn’t convinced more tornadoes have been forming in recent years. He believes fewer tornados are going unsighted and unrecorded because of increased attention on storms that might produce tornadoes.

“It’s to the point now where I don’t know that a tornado will occur without being sighted,” Hayes said. “It’s not going to happen.”

For example, he said, storm chasers converged on a remote area on Thursday in southwest Kansas in anticipation of tornadoes. None developed, he said, but had there been a tornado, it would have been well-documented.