6/23 - 11:30pm MDT - Who's Ready to Go North?

Our tour guests have been through orientation and now we're ready to set off for our northward journey tomorrow from Denver to the region where Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota meet. This area will be on the northwestern side of the large ridge in the middle of the country and on the eastern side of the trough coming onshore from the Pacific. This means there will be southwesterly winds aloft, at 500 mb or 18,000 feet, to hopefully bring in some drier air so that instability will increase when it contrasts with the warm, moist air at the surface that will be rising into it. While weak in speed, the winds up there will also increase wind shear because they will be at odds with the easterly and southeasterly winds at the surface. This will increase helicity a little bit, which is a corkscrew-like rotation in the atmosphere that is good for fueling rotating thunderstorms.

Moisture shouldn't be too big of a deal since dewpoints will be in the 60's, but we'll be eying the potential for issues with the the cap, which is a warm layer of air above the surface that inhibits thunderstorm development. All the warm air in place over the central part of the country breeds strong capping since the warm air is in place at the mid levels, but the models are suggesting that this cap may be overcome tomorrow afternoon and lead to some isolated storms. At this point there is nothing that suggests any storm that forms will be anything past marginally severe, but the helicity that the NAM model is picking up on above is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

The Storm Prediction Center has a general thunderstorm risk out for our target area tomorrow with no chance for severe weather. Since storms will be pretty isolated and in a fairly unpopulated area, it may not be worth it for them to issue any sort of severe risk with a setup this marginal. We'll see how things have developed overnight when we set out in the morning though. A secondary low may try to form in western South Dakota tomorrow according to the NAM and that may influence our decision on where to go if it forms since the best winds will be just to the north of the low center. Hopefully we'll see some storms!

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