Today's blog post title is the South Dakota's state slogan. As you can probably gather by that, we're in South Dakota today! Southwesterly flow aloft at 500 mb (18,000 feet) will be present in the western half of South Dakota, northwest Nebraska, and Eastern Wyoming today as the general pattern we dealt with yesterday continues. While the winds aren't terribly strong, the RAP model is beginning to pick up on an area of enhanced speeds near 30-40 knots around parts of Western South Dakota and Northwestern Nebraska. If this enhanced area verifies there could be some better storms under it.
At the surface right now there are southeasterly winds across this area, but the more easterly of the wind vectors are favoring Western South Dakota right now. We'll see how this develops throughout the day as surface conditions continue to change. We'll want these more easterly wind vectors becuase they'll contribute to low-level wind shear that could possibly lead to rotating storms, should they form.
I say "should they form" because we're still dealing with some very warm temperatures aloft. These warm temperatures aloft, called "the cap", inhibit storm development because rising air parcels can't continue to rise buoyantly if the environmental air around them is warmer than they are. The good news here is that temperatures at the surface today will again be in the 90's to near or above 100 degrees. This will really heat up these surface air parcels so that they might shoot through the cap. All models I've looked at this morning have the cap breaking at some point in the early to mid afternoon, but where exactly this happens is still in question. The 14z RAP model has an interesting hole in the cap at around 4pm near Rapid City, but our current thinking is that the Black Hills near Rapid City will be a focus for storm development because they are a constant source of lift and thus a typical location for storm initiation.
To get some of the heating we'll need for storms to form today, we need to have a plentiful supply of sunshine. Right now we do have a layer of clouds over South Dakota that is inhibiting this right now, but western parts of the state are clearing out and it should hopefully leave us with blue skies later this morning. Storms should form sometime after 3pm this afternoon should things come together as forecast. The main threats will be wind and hail from any storm that forms, but we'll be on the lookout for some rotation in these storms as well. The Storm Prediction Center has a general thunderstorm risk for our target area today, but also mentions a 5% severe wind and hail risk.
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