April 29 Severe Weather Forecast #1

A nice and cool day today with temperatures only into the low to mid 60s over the region. A few showers were able to develop thanks to the abundant sunshine and cool temperatures aloft, however nothing widespread or too significant. We'll see the winds turn to the south during the overnight tonight, beginning to bring back the warm and moist air that was shunted southeast with the cold front this past weekend. This will set the stage for a severe weather event Thursday evening and overnight as a large trough moves eastward onto the Plains.

Details are still sketchy despite being only 2 1/2 days out, with the GFS still playing catch-up with the NAM and especially the ECMWF/GEM models. Strong southerly flow at the surface and above the surface should yield sufficient moisture return with ~60 surface dew points to the Central Plains by Thursday evening. This southerly flow will continue into the evening hours, and combined with strong flow in the mid-levels from the west-southwest will yield strong shear values over the area of interest. The combination of instability and shear does yield 0-3km EHI values of 3-4 which given a surface based storm would likely be more than sufficient for rotation in the lowest portions of the storm. Other parameters to note would be mixed layer CAPE of 1000-1500 J/kg, deep layer (0-6km) shear of 45-55 knots with a vector more normal than not to the boundary over south-central Kansas and Oklahoma. Such strong wind fields throughout all of the levels will end up giving fairly quick storm motions of 30-40 mph to the northeast, which would be favorable for any storms moving off of the dryline and into an even higher dew point environment.

All of the above parameters would be more than sufficient for strong rotating supercells likely capable of tornadoes given the strong deep layer and storm-relative shear. However, there are definitely some negatives at this point with the setup on Thursday. Moisture return will be sufficient for thunderstorms, however given surface temperatures of 80+ degrees F will give way to ~20 degree F dew point depressions and LCL heights of 1500 meters or higher. This decreases the tornado potential initially, but with storm modification of the surrounding environment could definitely still yield tornadoes. A pronounced warm nose in the lower levels will also give way to some substantial inhibition for surface based parcels to initially develop. There are of course many other details which will hopefully become better defined by tomorrow night, but for now it does appear that the positives outweigh the negatives on this setup for severe weather.

An additional update is likely by tomorrow night, with the final details regarding my chasing opportunities with this setup. A quick glance beyond Thursday doesn't give much model consensus, but it would appear that a continued threat of showers and thunderstorms would appear likely.