Monday, May 24, 2010

5/23 - 11:45pm CDT - Bust Today in Nebraska

Things didn't go so well in Nebraska today. We stayed along the warm front in Southwest Nebraska/Northwest Kansas where east winds, building instability, and decent shear was, but things fell apart before they could even get started. The main reason for this was the low in Colorado unexpectedly moving westward just before storm initiation. This turned our east winds into south winds and threw our shear into the garbage. Storms that initiated moved south to north with little to no rotation and tended to pulse instead of slowly build up strength. There were a few reports of tornadoes in Northwest Kansas this evening, but they were generally weak and most likely caused by outflow boundary convergence and micro rotational factors instead of large scale shear. We threw in the towel around 8pm this evening when the storms all weakened considerably, but we managed to see a nice sunset and a few mammatus clouds under the anvil of a storm to our north. The shot on the left is from our live stream this evening... that's me taking a picture of the mammatus clouds.

Looks like we'll be in South or North Dakota tomorrow as a low travels from Colorado to South Dakota. The latest NAM computer model run indicates east winds along the ND/SD border tomorrow afternoon with good shear, dew points near 70, and EHI values of 3 or more. I certainly think that tomorrow will have more potential than today, but we'll know for sure by tomorrow morning. For now, the SPC has placed North Dakota and South Dakota under a 30% Slight Risk of severe weather for tomorrow. There's talk that they may upgrade to a Moderate Risk tomorrow morning, so we'll see how that pans out!

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