5/24 - 11:30am CDT - A Repositioning Day

Yep, there's a Moderate Risk for severe storms in parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa today according to the Storm Prediction Center. It's too bad because we simply can't chase there due to the amount of trees and vegetation along with a considerable distance from Oklahoma City where we need to be tomorrow night. Here's the plan then: We're going to drive south from Des Moines to Kansas City and then cut west in Kansas for this evening when we could see some overnight storms with lightning in that region.

Tomorrow still looks interesting to say the least. Right out front I need to say that this setup has a very high bust potential because of all the capping that will be in place. Warm temperatures of 10 degrees Celsius and higher at 10,000 feet (700 mb) will act as this capping mechanism because it will inhibit warm air from rising buoyantly into the layers above for thunderstorm formation. With that said, this cap may weaken just enough for a couple of storms to fire up in Kansas tomorrow. They would likely be very isolated due to the capped environment, so that's definitely a plus here.

We all know by now that the models have not been handling moisture very well lately and tomorrow probably won't be any different. The NAM model has dew points of 65 degrees Fahrenheit and higher in Central Kansas at 4pm CDT. If this is overdone and we see dew points between 60 and 65 degrees it still wouldn't be too bad. An area of low pressure smack dab over the middle of Kansas should help bring some of this moisture in and also create a considerable amount of wind shear for rotating storms, especially near the warm front just south of the Nebraska border. Again, this is all if the cap actually breaks tomorrow. If it doesn't we'll be sweating it out in the sun as we watch cumulus cloud towers fail to rise high enough for storms. Tomorrow morning I'll post again with an update on this potential.

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5/6 - 11:45pm CDT - Bust Today in Kansas, Texas Tomorrow

A layer of cirrus clouds really but a damper on our chase today as they blocked storms from forming along a cold front that was in the process of moving through Central Kansas and Northwest Oklahoma. The cold front also accelerated, which didn't help since areas that were prime for development had their warm, moist air swept out quickly. Storms did develop in Northeast Kansas today, but the potential up there for the best isolated storms was considerably less than where we were based on the data we use. Those storms were clustered together as expected, but a couple were able to get out by themselves for a bit and get a little rotation (one dropped a funnel cloud that possibly touched down briefly near Kansas City). At the end of the afternoon we ended up getting on I-35 and making our way south toward Texas where we want to be for tomorrow. Check out the nice sunset in the image on the right from Oklahoma City!

Tomorrow we'll likely be somewhere around South Central Texas, where the dry line will be the focus for storm development. Moisture will be plentiful there since the front we chased near today will not have swept through Texas yet. The dry line will not be terribly sharp in the area in question tomorrow according to the 0z NAM model. We really want that sharp dry line so that it provides good lift for storm development, but we'll see how it pans out tomorrow morning. The Storm Prediction Center's latest severe weather outlook has a Slight Risk for areas east of Fort Stockton tomorrow, but my hunch is that it may move east a little bit in their next outlook based on some of the data I've seen this evening. We'll look at the data tomorrow morning and I'll post on here once we're on the road!

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