Another May Dud

In what is now becoming a disturbing tradition, May is proving to be a real dud for chasers. Can anybody think back to a truly productive May? We get one...maybe two significant events, but then the upper air pattern twists and contorts into every conceivable orientation to kill chasing prospects. It seems that we always get a stretch of 2 weeks or more of absolutely pitiful patterns. Unfortunately, the pattern seems to be too active further east into devestated areas like Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee....the "new" tornado alley. I'm sure everybody would agree to have tornado alley shift back into more sparsely populated areas.

And now, 2008 appears to once again laugh in the face of that ol' chaser proverb "When it's May, you chase". Instead of May 1 being officially declared the real start of chase season, it should be declared the month of "just how is mother nature going to screw up May THIS year...again."

The medium arnge models are showing a very stubborn, large upper air trough and cyclone over the eastern half of the country. It does not appear to move much before the end of this month. The GFS has been oscillating it's solutions, but ensembles and the general trend of the GFS and ECMWF aren't looking good for us chasers.

Along with a very annoying, strong and persistant NW flow keeping the moisture scoured throughout the plains, this whole pattern appears deep enough to eventually sweep the moisture out of the entire GOM region and replace it with humongous amounts of drier air in the lower levels. Nice.

So, when the upper pattern does eventually evolve into something favoring stormchasing, we are going to have a helluva time really recovering the the lower levels. It will take a pretty long time to do that. Sure, we'll get some thin moisture recovery close to the surface, but as we saw in 2006, the 850mb layers will give us fits and mix out surface moisture in horrendous fashion. I remember that period a couple of years ago...start off with 65Td in the morning and by afternoon...50Td or worse despite winds howling from the GOM. Ugh.

Exactly how much dry air we'll have to deal with when things start to change is up in the air. My gut instinct says it will be tough as I described above. I hope I'm wrong. In taking a stab at when we might enjoy some good chasing again, I'm thinking Memorial Day Weekend. Maybe June will help save yet another dismal chaser year known as 2008.

In the meantime, I'll have plenty of opportunities to go review my video and pictures to inflate my tornado counts this season. I'll use electron microscopes, Hubble space telescope, Ouija boards, soothsayers, psychic detectives, checmically induced hallucinations, and even a CSI unit to help me pick out tornadoes that I just "know" were there, but couldn't see by any normal means. :-)

Seriously, there will be some camping/fishing trips coming up to Lake Alan Henry or Greenbelt Lake. So, my homies out there, give me a shout and we'll go chase some bass. That's one hobby that the upper air pattern won't be a detriment too. :-)