Hey Y'all. What an pre-storm environement in IA!!!. Sort of reminds me of the Jarrell, TX but much more unstable CAPE-wise.
[/b]
I liken it more to the 6/20/06 bust in IA... That day featured strong instability, pretty good low-level shear along and to the north of the OFB, which was located in a similar area as the current OFB. In addition, if I remember correctly, the strongest sfc convergence was in far nw IA, similar to where it is now. Of course, 6-20-06 was a non-event owing to some capping and subsidence in the wake of morning convection and an early-afternoon shortwave trough. Wait a second, that sounds familiar...
Orange City IA (NW IA) is 95/81... Yuck. Looking at sfc winds in that area, there must be pretty substantial surface convergence... Orange City has ENE winds, while Le Mars IA (less than 15 miles to the south-southwest of Orange City) has SSW winds. Other obs nearby seem to support this wind field.
Edit: The storms in ne NE may actually help storms develop in nw IA soon... Low-level RH is relatively low in Nebraska, which means that there is likely some decent evaporational cooling occurring in the low-levels. With WSW 850-700mb flow, this cooled air may advect into nw IA, replacing the warmer temps that have capped off nw IA to surface-based parcels thus far. The same may happen if elevated showers continue to develop in nw IA -- evaporational cooling of the capping layer. I'd imagine this effect would be most prominent when there is significant directional shear in the low-levels, in which case the 850-700mb rain-cooled air would advect differently than the sfc outflow (which means that you can have rain-cooled 850-700mb "air" atop the warm, moist air at the surface) . This is the case (to a degree) today in IA.
Surface-based instability decreases quite a bit east of Estherville, where temperatures are being held in the upper-70s to mid-80s (relative to the mid-90s to near 100F farther west). Eek, Storm Lake is 97/77? Miserable.