State of the Chase Season 2025

[Jeff House]

Looks like early next week has potential in the southern High Plains. Could start Raton Mesa and maybe end down near the Pecos River the 2nd or 3rd day. I don't expect the SPC to address it in Day 4-8 products, but it would show up Day 3 and closer. Closed lows that region can be a mix of sloppy and great days.

Next it does appear a quiet period starts later next week through that weekend; so, centered around May 10. A quiet stretch a third of the way into May is not unusual. Closed low lumbers across the East, perhaps even close to my Tennessee Valley - none of which is good for Plains action.

Then around mid-May things look ok to me. Heights rise in the Eastern US and look near normal in the Rockies. Some members still have AN heights in the Northern Plains and Midwest, but that leaves the door open central/south. One might be able to just go for a week without stressing over missing the one great trough. Except for that period centered around May 10, this year one could/can likely find local action in most 7-day periods. A steady stream of local days is probably better than just a few regional outbreaks for chase vacations.

 

[JamesCaruso]

If you want to believe the majority of models, it's going to be sleepy time weather after this cut-off enigma passes. The only glimmer of hope is after the 13th or so. Still looking at early next week, but the evolution of the cut-off is not as interesting in the latest guidance. Not sure I'd want to chase a one-day event with no options until the middle of May.

Exactly why I decided not to go out for this short window I had available from 5/1-5/6; I saw it as a one-day event at best, at least within that timeframe. My next window begins 5/13, so hoping that pans out. I can actually stay out all but 3 days from 5/13-6/8. I have to return home for my son’s college graduation on 5/22, so with travel I’ll be out of play 5/21-5/23. So I advise everyone to plan to chase those three days, because I just know they will be the best days of the year, perhaps of the decade.

 

[Jason N]

I've been looking at the CPC products for May to middle June, and to be honest some of the Precip they issued/updated as of yesterday is , at least to me, going to place their earlier 17 April Precip predictions for MJJ out of alignment. I am probably going to be out from 13 to 23June. that's the plan, no matter what happens, I will find something!

 

[JamesCaruso]

Except for that period centered around May 10, this year one could/can likely find local action in most 7-day periods. A steady stream of local days is probably better than just a few regional outbreaks for chase vacations.

Ordinarily this would sound great. But I probably outsmarted myself by replacing a traditional 2-week chase vacation with a longer-term “work remotely and chase when it looks good” arrangement. The idea was to use 10 PTO days more productively - not waste 2 weeks on an inactive stretch, not miss the “big days” that seem to always happen before and after the chase vacation, etc. That means rationing the PTO time for the better days; obviously I can’t take off work the whole time and chase every possible day. If it’s a steady stream of small-scale chasing opportunities over multiple weeks, it’s going to be very hard to decide when to go for it and when to bail. I could see letting stuff go at the beginning in the hope of better days that never come, or chasing too much at the beginning and having no time left for later season upside.

Very stressful juggling work and chasing, setting expectations with a boss and colleagues, etc. There are definitely some advantages to rolling the dice on a particular period. And plenty of downside too. Can’t wait to retire so I can stop having to make the trade-off.

 

[Jason N]

and from the Mouth of the CPC itself Noting the first sentence in their pargraph

 

[Jason N]

Can’t wait to retire so I can stop having to make the trade-off.

100%

 

[Brett Nickeson]

For those of us that don't chase Texas or NM, it's officially "look two+ weeks out on the CFS to try and find a chase day" season.

Sigh. Every year around the beginning of May this happens.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

For those of us that don't chase Texas or NM, it's officially "look two+ weeks out on the CFS to try and find a chase day" season.

Sigh. Every year around the beginning of May this happens.

Today's 0Z run looked beautiful for the last full week of May. Then the 06Z run comes in and suggests the preceding week might be better, with just a couple good days carrying over into the weekend of the 24th-25th. How annoying for those of us who have to pick one week or the other.

Yesterday's 12Z run also looked pretty solid for the last full week of the month. The 18Z less so but still serviceable. Might give it a few more runs and then just throw a dart at the calendar, lol.

 

[Brett Roberts]

Some friendly advice: monitoring individual deterministic CFS runs beyond week 2 is unlikely to provide any value, just wild emotional swings multiple times per day. If anything, I'd be looking for consistent trends for a future time period averaged over numerous consecutive runs (time-lagged ensemble plots are one way of doing this). But really, I would recommend focusing more on the nightly 00z GEFS runs that go out to FH840 for more stable and meaningful signals in that week 3-5 range, alongside the ECMWF weeklies and such.

And on that note, I'm still not seeing any really encouraging signals on this guidance. We know the next 10-12 days will be fairly dead, and then we don't know exactly what will happen after that. But what signals do exist on numerical guidance continue to suggest a tendency for SW flow that stays bottled up in the intermountain west and struggles to extend into the Plains. To the extent this is accurate, it seems like opportunities in mid-late May might be focused initially in NM/W TX and eventually the High Plains in general, and biased more toward a marginal zonal to NW flow regime and less toward classic tornado-favoring SW flow.

 

[Warren Faidley]

The CFS did a good job of picking up the dead period over a week ago. With the unusual heavy rain in NM and W. TX it will be interesting to see what happens in late May and June when climatology throws in the wild cards. e.g., NW flow.

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

For those of us that don't chase Texas or NM, it's officially "look two+ weeks out on the CFS to try and find a chase day" season.

Sigh. Every year around the beginning of May this happens.

Happy Death Ridge to us...Happy Death Ridge to us...Happy Death Ridge to us...this period in May really sucks.

 

[Sean Ramsey]

Days like today are kind of what I was thinking of when I made my last post. SPC didn't even assign a tornado risk this morning and bumped it up to a 2% this afternoon and low and behold it's producing in Central Texas. Not obvious at all, but there it is. It's been a thing this season.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Sometimes rightly deciding *not* to chase can be almost as satisfying as deciding to chase, although there is always a lot of anxiety along the way (my chase partner coined the phrase “reverse chasing,” for when you decide not to chase, and hope nothing happens, so that you don’t have to regret missing it).

Which is to say I’m glad I bailed on this short stretch I had to go out from 5/1-5/6. Today’s SPC outlooks confirm the only potential day in that stretch is Monday 5/5. TBD for the day or two after that, but doesn’t look compelling, and I would have been flying back on the 6th anyway.

So now I’ll begin to look ahead to the 13th. I’ll have a little more than a week for that trip, so the bar for making the trip is a little lower. Meaning that, as long as there are 60s dewpoints and any SW flow at all, I’ll be heading out, working remotely so that I am in the Alley “just in case” there are some good setups in that window of time.

 

[Jason N]

Today's 0Z run looked beautiful for the last full week of May. Then the 06Z run comes in and suggests the preceding week might be better, with just a couple good days carrying over into the weekend of the 24th-25th. How annoying for those of us who have to pick one week or the other.

Yesterday's 12Z run also looked pretty solid for the last full week of the month. The 18Z less so but still serviceable. Might give it a few more runs and then just throw a dart at the calendar, lol.

Andy I've noticed that swing as well and honestly I think I prefer to sustainably use only the 12Z & 00Z run a lot more than 06 or 18Z.. it seems to have this history of throwing off everything. at least in terms of the globals with the most amount of pattern stability, and I just end up comparing day to day runs from previous 00 to 00Z runs to look for those changes at 24hr intervals.. I don't know if that helps, or it's something you're already doing.

 

[Jason N]

Days like today are kind of what I was thinking of when I made my last post. SPC didn't even assign a tornado risk this morning and bumped it up to a 2% this afternoon and low and behold it's producing in Central Texas. Not obvious at all, but there it is. It's been a thing this season.

I think its been a "thing" for the last few seasons.. and the odd thing is.. one day its "over-forecasted" , another day, it's day 2 to 1 upgrades sometimes, 1 or 2 orders of risk between 12 to 1630Z. Something is definitely different about SPC in recent years.