What did I miss?

[Shane Adams]

Couple 'o things...

First off, to say nobody missed anything yesterday is completely wrong. There was a nice photogenic tornado in N Oklahoma. Anyone who looked at the setup and understands that mesoscale magic can and does happen, would've known to be out there despite crappy shear profiles...because of insane instability. I guess some people need a MOD RISK setup to see anything, meaning a 3-5 storm situation where they're all tornadic. Makes it harder to bust when you've got 30,000 square miles of tornadic storm coverage. Yesterday was a great one, if you forecast well. The KS/OK border was the place to be, and chasers who understand real-time situations both in the hours before and during a severe situation were up there.....needing only a single storm/tornado to be successful. I'm still blown away how so many chasers who criticize the SPC and swear they "do their own forecasting" get down on chase days that don't have large coverage areas.....in other words, they scoff at slight risk days. For anyone who knows how to forecast, you only need one storm.

Secondly, I'd like to address all the newer members here. I'm going to get (yet another) infraction for this, but by now ST knows I could care less. Please don't be discouraged by Joey Ketchum's ****ty attitude on here. He routinely makes snide, smartass, and otherwise crappy remarks to innocent questions, and I can easily see how this would turn off someone who was just starting out on here. He's become the ST grouch for whatever reason, so pay him no mind.

 

[Andrew Ryan]

Couple 'o things...

First off, to say nobody missed anything yesterday is completely wrong. There was a nice photogenic tornado in N Oklahoma. Anyone who looked at the setup and understands that mesoscale magic can and does happen, would've known to be out there despite crappy shear profiles...because of insane instability. I guess some people need a MOD RISK setup to see anything, meaning a 3-5 storm situation where they're all tornadic. Makes it harder to bust when you've got 30,000 square miles of tornadic storm coverage. Yesterday was a great one, if you forecast well. The KS/OK border was the place to be, and chasers who understand real-time situations both in the hours before and during a severe situation were up there.....needing only a single storm/tornado to be successful. I'm still blown away how so many chasers who criticize the SPC and swear they "do their own forecasting" get down on chase days that don't have large coverage areas.....in other words, they scoff at slight risk days. For anyone who knows how to forecast, you only need one storm.

I think saying that extreme instability, low shear days equals tornadoes is a bold statement. We've had quite a few high instability days the past couple of weeks and a couple resulted in tornadoes. When you have those days, usually you have an OFB to locally increase the LL shear.

Yesterday, I thought the cold front was going to make everything go linear, but obviously that changed very quickly. And even if they managed to stay isolated, the storms were basically on the cold front. So, I would have expected the storms to be undercut by the cold front. I was surprised to see that storm on KS/OK border become tornado warned. I thought they were crazy. But I could only look at the radar on my cellphone at work and really couldn't get a good feel for the storm. But I guess the air behind the cold front wasn't especially cold and didn't cause too many problems.

 

[Justin Wiley]

But I guess the air behind the cold front wasn't especially cold and didn't cause too many problems.

You're exactly right. I was monitoring surface obs fairly closely yesterday, especially towards the southern end of the front in Kansas and Oklahoma. The colder air behind the front was well behind the actual S-NW wind shift. For instance, Wichita had a temperature in the lower 80's and a dewpoint in the upper 60's for at least two hours after the winds shifted from the NW.

Anybody know why cooler air lags behind wind shifts during some fronts and is right on its heels (most of the time) during others?

 

[Jeff Duda]

You're exactly right. I was monitoring surface obs fairly closely yesterday, especially towards the southern end of the front in Kansas and Oklahoma. The colder air behind the front was well behind the actual S-NW wind shift. For instance, Wichita had a temperature in the lower 80's and a dewpoint in the upper 60's for at least two hours after the winds shifted from the NW.

Anybody know why cooler air lags behind wind shifts during some fronts and is right on its heels (most of the time) during others?

I was wondering that, too. It seemed to me the line of storms wasn't following the cold front exactly. Some of the model runs had a pre-frontal trough in them. Perhaps that could have explained the setup. Perhaps some phenomenon of cold frontal wind/temperature decoupling can occur on the tail end of some fronts.