"It's been a year of extremes," said Mel Goldstein, former head of the meteorology department at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury and a forecaster on WTNH-New Haven. "It's been wacky weather."

When tornadoes touched down in Bethel and Newtown in mid-May, the news was strange enough to get people's attention -- especially the people in Newtown and Bethel who had trees lying atop their minivans.

But going back to 1797, when a tornado swept into Ridgefield and injured six people, tornadoes have been known to drop down around here now and then.

Like witches, they fly in, spin the world apart, then leave.

This week, golf ball-sized hail fell along the Interstate 84 corridor, ending a cycle of wild thunderstorms. In May, a landspout -- a sort of giant dust devil -- touched down in Somers.

The remains of Barry, a tropical storm that crossed over Florida, and made a beeline for Connecticut last weekend and soaked the state.

"It's early June," said Bill Jacquemin of the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury, pointing out Connecticut doesn't usually get tropical storms until late summer. "It's crazy."

There was the flooding caused by the April nor'easter. And there was a winter that stopped making sense in December and stayed off-kilter long after the March solstice.

There was a frost this week in the Adirondacks. Farther afield, there was a cyclone in Iran -- the first time in history that's happened.

"It's weird, but not OK weird," Jacquemin said. "It's disturbingly weird."

"It's been a year of extremes," said Mel Goldstein, former head of the meteorology department at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury and a forecaster on WTNH-New Haven. "It's been wacky weather."

The great unanswered -- maybe soon-to-be-answered -- question is this: Is the weather we've seen this year just a string of oddities or is it a harbinger of things to come?

One of the things climatologists have been emphasizing about the ongoing climate change is Connecticut will not be a new Bermuda on the Sound -- mild and placid with hibiscus and oleander blooming by the doorstep.

Rather, we will live in a climate of extremes -- more intense heat waves, heavier rains, and more powerful coastal storms.

For Goldstein, the case for 2006-07 being the first year of the new wild order has yet to be proved. "One swallow does not a summer make," he said.

But Jacquemin said what we've seen in the past few months is -- and at least for the next few decades may be -- our weather norm. Eventually, he said, we'll settle down to a climate that's more Mid-Atlantic than New England, more Washington, D.C., than Boston.

"We're going to have to get used to it," he said.

In the meantime, there's the summer to come. Last year was an El Nino year -- the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that pushed the Atlantic hurricanes out to sea.

This is a La Nina year, with cooler waters in the Pacific. That means the more storms that hug the coast and head our way.

"My wife's not going to be happy," Goldstein said. "We have a lot of outdoor furniture that I'm going to be bringing inside this summer."