Brett, great post, I have to agree that it has been quite disappointing since Tuesday, May 28 (we elected not to chase in the trees of northeastern TX or anywhere near DFW on the 29th). My chase partner and I couldn’t start our chase vacation until the 23rd, so we missed the 17th (McCook NE) and 20th (Mangum OK). We did have six good chase days in a row from the 23rd through 28th - without much success in the tornado department, but we have only ourselves to blame for that. Still, as others have said, the overall pattern did not quite live up to the high expectations for the period.
Regardless, at the end of that stretch, I still had another 10 or 11 days left on my chase vacation, potentially my longest trip ever. Never did I expect (although I always feared) that it would already be pretty much over for me after just one week. Some good moisture in NM went to waste in recent days, that’s for sure. It’s a shame 500mb flow was so weak, you really don’t even need much for some magic to happen on the High Plains given sufficient moisture/instability but there was little more than a light breeze in the mid-levels up.
We actually ended our trip early; I flew home from Denver to Philadelphia yesterday after migrating back toward Denver on the previous two days. I do regret not sticking around long enough to chase NM on Monday 6/3 or Tuesday 6/4, especially after being down there already on Sunday. On Monday, SPC did not even include NM in a 2% tornado risk, and for Tuesday the models were showing mid-level flow to be even weaker. So we blew off both days, figuring we would target southeast CO (which actually did have a 2% tornado risk) on Monday and then just continue on to DEN on Tuesday. But while heading north on Monday I tortured myself watching several TOR-warnings west of Roswell; there were no confirmed tornados, but I’m sure the supercells looked pretty good structurally (not sure if these were separate and successive storms, or the same one, I wasn’t monitoring radar all that closely). Then on Tuesday, SPC corrborated the weaker flow yet still put up a 2% TOR probability in NM despite not having one the day before, and there was a confirmed TOR, again west of Roswell. Ugh.
But it’s always too easy to second-guess yourself with the benefit of hindsight; that’s one of the most frustrating things about this hobby. Fact is, for me there comes a time on a long chase trip when work and family responsibilities begin to pull you back home... If some true possible tornado days were likely, I would have stuck around and dealt with the consequences later, but when I feel like I’m just jerking around with obligatory chases on marginal days, staying out becomes harder to justify. And as much as I love chasing, there comes a point when I lose my motivation to even make the effort on such marginal days.