State of the Chase Season 2026

[Paul Sherman]

Pretty dismal outlook after today's Illinois/Missouri chase, maybe some cold front scraps tomorrow then RH gets shunted to the Gulf and not looking like a return until maybe the end of the first week of May. Dont think I have ever seen Low 40s Dps in Oklahoma on May 1st before in the 22 years I have been doing this Malarky.

Let's hope this is the last Gulf Scourer of the Season not even the Fort to fall back on yet lol

 

[Chris Wilburn]

Pretty dismal outlook after today's Illinois/Missouri chase, maybe some cold front scraps tomorrow then RH gets shunted to the Gulf and not looking like a return until maybe the end of the first week of May. Dont think I have ever seen Low 40s Dps in Oklahoma on May 1st before in the 22 years I have been doing this Malarky.

Let's hope this is the last Gulf Scourer of the Season not even the Fort to fall back on yet lol

Definitely a dismal outlook after today. Both the GFS and ECMWF have been showing the RH getting shoved all the way into the Gulf for the past several days; have to believe that's a very likely scenario at this point. I would also say end of the first week of May is the next realistic chance for chaseable storms.

 

[JamesCaruso]

The timing mentioned by @Paul Sherman potentially coincides well with my plans to head to the Plains on May 11. It’s so anxiety-provoking seeing all this recent activity and being unable to be there. Missing big days is bad enough, let alone the constant fear that “this could be it” - that an early start to the season means an early end. Last year, there was a shorter stretch of good days on the southern Plains right around this same time, and sure enough May was pretty quiet except for a couple days mid-month.

That said, considering much of the past ~2 weeks have had favorable southwest flow and moisture, we squeezed relatively little out of it. Thursday April 23 was obviously phenomenal, but other than that we had a couple days where the flow was parallel to the dryline and storm interference/seeding ruined the day, and then Sunday April 26 was relatively disappointing compared to the forecast a few days ago, at which point Sunday appeared to be the best day. I haven’t done any careful analysis since I’m not chasing anyway, but Thursday was probably a sleeper day at one point. I’m ignoring the Midwest of course, as that would normally be out of range on my Plains chase trips.

If the week of May 11 isn’t looking good, I’m not going to head out. I have some flexibility because I’ll be working remotely and not taking committed PTO. I do have a hard stop to get back home around June 17 or so, but I have a decent window of time for chasing this year. I don’t mind hanging around out there during down periods between chases, but there’s no reason to leave the comforts of home to start the trip before I need to.

 

[Bobby Little]

I was gonna chase southern Illinois today and catch the David Byrne concert in St. Louis on Tues. Decided to nix that long drive for this 1 day event. Everything shuts right down for the next ten days with little RH and crappy DPTs. Maybe a small event middle !st week of May in southern plains but that doesnt even look ripe. James Caruso I think your trip after Mothers Day will work out as the models showing return moisture flow. It looks like i will wait for that time frame also with my finger on the trigger and head out for a week.

 

[Mitch Drabenstott]

Pretty dismal outlook after today's Illinois/Missouri chase, maybe some cold front scraps tomorrow then RH gets shunted to the Gulf and not looking like a return until maybe the end of the first week of May. Dont think I have ever seen Low 40s Dps in Oklahoma on May 1st before in the 22 years I have been doing this Malarky.

Let's hope this is the last Gulf Scourer of the Season not even the Fort to fall back on yet lol

The chase tours are going to have a rough time with this pattern. Some of them already are, as many tour groups won’t venture too far east of the high plains for setups like today and yesterday. It does look like there’s a brief window of opportunity next Tues/Wed for a SLGT/ENH day or two, but then there’s days of cool, dry weather again. As a guest on a tour during last year’s dead mid-May week (1 chase day out of 7 tour days), I feel for these people. You look forward to a trip that you spent thousands on only to get 1 or 2 days of chasing. Sightseeing is nice but it’s not the reason you book the trip.

 

[Warren Faidley]

There is almost always some type of reset in the action during the late April / early May period, when the RH is pushed back to the Gulf and it takes a week+ to recover. This will likely shift / reset the season towards the west. The models are in good agreement of nixing SP action until after May 7. Fortunately, NCEP modeling does not show any crazy ridging ATM. It looks like a deployment date of around May 7-10 for me.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Agreed - these downtimes can be a welcome break. A great May for me typically will be dull May 1-21 with an action-filled last 10 days. Many of my better seasons have been like that.

 

[JamesCaruso]

I'm definitely hoping for more than that, given my ability to work remotely and not limited to the luck of the draw with a pre-selected two-week chase vacation. I would actually rather the activity be spread out, which helps me keep things going at work without having to disappear for days at a stretch. But there are pros and cons to everything; it's also fun to get fully immersed in a daily chasing cadence over a week or more. And I do hope that the one week my son joins me is active.

Speaking of pros and cons, my remote work setup means taking the same amount of PTO time over a longer period, which means rationing it and not chasing every single marginal setup. Those are always hard decisions to make; it's hard to give up a chase just to save the PTO and wait for something better later, because that better day may never come! And of course when my son is with me I need to optimize his time. So it will be a tough balance this year. It worked OK last year and hopefully will work again this time. I have actually already told my boss I am semi-retiring this fall and plan to leave when they find a replacement (probably September), so candidly I plan to be a little more aggressive about prioritizing chasing and less concerned about how it "looks" to take time off on short notice as chase opportunities materialize and those marginal / less than 2% tornado risk Day 2's suddenly become slight / 2% Day 1's!

 

[Brett Roberts]

As the early season wraps up, it's hard to complain about the outcome thus far. There were numerous trash setups and teases on the Plains in March and April, but then the final week came through with a few great storms. And that's about all you can ask for before May, outside the most extraordinary years: one or two legitimately good Plains days.

That said, I don't see much reason for optimism looking forward. We're shifting into the worst pattern for this time of year, persistent and pronounced Hudson Bay troughing, for what looks like an extended period (no real sign of abatement on the ensembles through D15). A break of 5-7 days after an active period can be nice; a potential break of two weeks or longer to start off peak season doesn't really have much upside. What's more acutely disappointing is that much of the prime chase country from the Panhandles through W/C KS and NE remains parched... and the incoming wet system for Fri-Sat has naturally trended much more suppressed, such that these areas will receive little to no rainfall. Instead, areas deep into TX that have already been drenched in recent weeks will soak up most of the rain from this system, and then we'll enter a long dry stretch. No doubt the pattern will improve at some point in May, but significant short-term drought remains the elephant in the room NW of roughly Abilene to Wichita to Omaha.

 

[Harlan U]

What's more acutely disappointing is that much of the prime chase country from the Panhandles through W/C KS and NE remains parched... and the incoming wet system for Fri-Sat has naturally trended much more suppressed, such that these areas will receive little to no rainfall. Instead, areas deep into TX that have already been drenched in recent weeks will soak up most of the rain from this system, and then we'll enter a long dry stretch. No doubt the pattern will improve at some point in May, but significant short-term drought remains the elephant in the room NW of roughly Abilene to Wichita to Omaha.

I concur. I was hoping this year would be a 2023 repeat with the ENSO conditions and all, but things have just been so dry this winter across the high plains. I can't prove it empirically but I suspect that the amazing high plains tornado season in 2023 was in no small part due to the incredible spring rains that year.

Currently, many areas of the high plains are 2" of precipitation below average, which would take a significant storm or two to erase. The picture looks pretty ghastly to be honest and I'm certainly not as optimistic about high plains chase prospects as I was earlier this year. Significant drought in this region is exactly what I would NOT want to see preceding a chase season.



There is reasonable support for some fairly good rain totals (~1" to 1.5") across Eastern CO and the Llano Estacado through the weekend and into next week. Of course, as mentioned above, these storms have been trending drier recently. Further out, climate models seem to be indicating that slightly higher precipitation is favored throughout May. The signals for this aren't as strong as I would really like but it's definitely better than another extended dry period.

Whatever rain we do get over the next two weeks will probably not be enough to significantly alter drought conditions on the high plains. At the moment I think the hope is that late May will deliver some nice precip that could get us out of this mess. Fingers crossed.