Today & This Week

UPDATE 2000z: Watching a small but intense supercell entering northern Gaines county SW of LBB. I know David Drummond lives close to there...hope he is able to intercept it. It has distinct low level rotation and a hook with 65+ dbz. It is moving ESE into southerly and even SE low level flow. Something has gotta be rotating. :-) For me, still watching the upper low approach slowly. Some intense, small cells pop up, but looks like vertical wind profiles are just too weak. Still, I plan to head S out of Amarillo in about an hour and see what I can see. I would love to be on that Gaines county cell.

A few landspouts/weak tornadoes today?

Upper low looks more pronounced on satellite this morning. Quite notable is the thin cloud shield over the NE, E, SE and S quadrants. In fact, there is alot of clear skies. This should allow some pretty good insolation resulting in pretty steep lapse rates of 7-8.5C/km and a bit of CAPE.....importantly the 0-3km CAPE. The RUC is showing an axis of strong 0-3km CAPE from near Amarillo and increasing as you head SE towards Snyder. The RUC NSTP is bullseyed near Dickens. Also, there appears to be some pretty good veering profiles setting up in this area.

So, the thing I'm looking for today will be boundaries. With so much convective nirvanna yesterday and relatively weak surface winds, there is bound to be one someplace. ;-) This should become more apparent in a few more hours. There is already some convection breaking out in a band from around Big Spring to Guthrie. This will be interesting to watch today because this might be a focus area right in the middle of the area forecasted to have the best overall parameters today.

With the clear skies up in the TX PH and the core of the low expected to travers this area, It hink this has just about as much potential today for rapid development of some storms. I see alot of parameters that have my interest for a possible chase within range for me today.

More later this afternoon.

Beyond, the models are really struggling from Wednesday onward. Wednesday looks like an active day for Texas as a pretty decent impulse comes across. The big show comes this weekend. I'm still siding with the very conistant ECMWF of a deeper/stronger solution. Still, I'd like to see some model agreement on this. Regardless, the weekend/early next week look active for the plains region. Hopefully the models will start coming into agreement in order to narrow down the timeline.

In the meantime, check out this awesome Jarrel, TX analysis/study. There is some really great stuff in here that I haven't seen before.