4/24/07 FCST: KS/OK/TX/MO/NE/IA/IL

[Brian Stertz]

Looking at everything...I have concluded that things are very early and that there will be multiple waves of supercells today. I am not sure if this falls into a violent tornado outbreak category (yet), but certainly do see the potential for multiple EF2-EF3 tornadoes in several favored areas. My 2 hard targets are across NC Kansas between Hays and Concordia. This area looks sweet to catch MANY tornadoes as they form down by I-70 move north towards the KS/NE border and then die. This could be very interesting situation and in a very favored area for such event to occur climatology-wise. The other area I am pretty interested in is the area between Topeka and St.Joseph MO...again on the warm front. I will focus my chase efforts today on the NC Kansas target. Further south, things look still very potent but a bit too complicated to sort out and make a clear cut chase decision. Best of luck to those chasing....it looks like by this evening...things WILL be wild and wooly....and probably be more obviously the real meat of this outbreak situation. It looks like the main wave will be shuffling out of E.New Mexico into W/C Kansas by evening, and should represent the bigtime verification of either the MDT or possibly HIGH risk.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Well, it appears that my group is going to head out to the OK/KS border area soon. I really think the best CAPE+shear combo may be farther south into southern OK and TX later today, but I don't think that matters much if storm mode is not favorable. Looking at the Fort Worth radar, light-mdt convection persist east and south of the DFW metroplex, and the front west of the DFW area appears to be oriented parallel to the deep-layer shear vectors, which may explain why we're seeing pretty solid linear mode.

It appears as though the current convection is starting to move off the front/dryline, at least across central Oklahoma. Some stations ~20-25 miles west of the back edge of the line are reporting southerly winds with Tds in the mid-60s, indicating that the front has not yet reach those locations. Certainly this situation looks considerably worse than it did prior to today, but that's the way these things go. I really hate these large, nearly vertically-stacked closed low situations. IME, we tend to see large problems with low-level flow as the surface low occludes deeply, which is happen in western KS today.

 

[Billy Griffin]

LOL, I've never seen anyone proclaim an area "hosed" minutes after a tornado watch was issued for it. These high-potential days seem to make some a little bonkers.

FWIW, this "crapvection" outbreak is what I was thinking would have occurred (and made a lame forecast for) last night. I was hoping this would have occurred earlier in the forecast period, allowing for true destabilization in advance of the dryline. In addition, a 10am squall line just kind of put me in a damper mood rather quickly. Widespread cloud cover, rapid evolution of a squall line, veering surface winds... that's why I made that statement. Although lower 60s TDs still linger out to the west of the precip, I still have my doubts. Must... hold... hope...