Saturday Recap and Today's Setup

Mother nature has a way of really surprising you as she did Saturday. Instead of the quick linear stuff and cold outflow dominated cells, 4 nice little discrete supercells popped up producing a few weak tornadoes. Most of the pics and video I've seen were dusty spinups, but a couple of bonafied tornadoes certainly danced across the south/central parts of Kansas near the I-35 corridor. One of the things I noted with each tornado-warned storm was that it got organized in an airmass with less than 20Td dewpoint depressions. That always seems to be a critical threshold. In addition, the RUC model by about 12/15z initialization times painted a bullseye of CAPE in that same area. So, my forecast of a dud event certainly got crushed, but I'm still content with sitting it out because of the long distance involved versus the results.

For today, I'll likely be sitting it out based on the 12/14z RUC. If I lived closer, I would certainly be targeting north-central Oklahoma up into southern kansas...pretty much the same area that had tornadic supercells Saturday. MLCAPE according to the RUC will approach 1000 by late afternoon. Combine storm-relative helicities exceeding 400 with lower LCLs and favorable dewpoint depressions, there should be something worthy of a chase. I expect to see at least a couple of bonafied tornado reports. However, from Amarillo, that is a heckuva long drive for so early in the season. BUT....I will be watching things in case things setup a little further west closer to the TX/OK border around the NE/E parts of the panhandle. There is a hint of that possibly happening, but I want some more evidence of that happening before hitting the road.

Further out on the forecast horizon, it appears that a significant round of precipitation is in store for most of Texas and in particular the very severe drought-stricken areas in the central and southern portions of the Lone Star State. This is good news indeed for many reasons including the approaching month of April.

Although the model spaghetti ensembles beyond day 7 are pretty scattered and "noisy", a consensus is starting to take shape which offers hope much further down the road....with one caveat. The models are forecasting a very deep and strong upper level cyclone over the eastern CONUS in the next 8-14 days. Should this verify, we will once again see the GOM basin smacked pretty hard by dry, stable air. So, I continue to think that most of the rest of March is going to struggle with quality moisture. In getting real whacky, looking at days 14-16 offer some slim glimmer of hope that the upper air pattern just might settle down into one more typical of March instead of early June.

Stay tuned!