April 12-14 Pre-Event Forecast

Hey everyone, it's been a while since my last post!  School and the college life has gotten the best of me for the past few months, but that's all changing now that the chase season is back in action.  I've already been out on two decent non-tornadic chases on March 27/28 to get me back in the flow of things, so I'll have reports on those events shortly.

Starting off with tomorrow, Thursday, I have a strong feeling this will be a significant chasing day for multiple reasons: not only will storm motions be extremely slow for the month of April, but directional shear and instability will overly each other in almost the most the most optimal areas along the dryline.  The helicity lines up with the proper dewpoint spreads so that there isn't massive 0-3km EHI over sky high LCL's.  This is the main problem with the target area down south in the Texas Panhandle into Oklahoma.  Many people have been obsessing over the morning convection feeding over the lifting warm front, but I honestly do not see how big of a problem this will be.  Sure, it is limiting our warm sector to about 100 miles wide, but if storms are moving at 10-15kts or less this won't be an issue - especially if our warm sector is continuously growing throughout the afternoon and evening.

I don't see much of anything wrong with that Skew-T/Hodo.  If that does, in fact, verify, storms will have no problem producing tomorrow afternoon and evening.  The initial target as of the 18z NAM is a Liberal to Dodge City to Scott City triangle.

Friday and Saturday both have definite tornadic supercell potential, although Saturday looks more like the potential significant outbreak.  That's all I'll talk about Saturday until we get within 48 hours, but for now it looks fantastic all the way from the warm front in Nebraska to the dryline intersection with the warm front all the way down into Central Texas.

Friday looked slightly marginal there for a while because of the models spitting out a squall line early in the afternoon (18z) due to capping issues, but that has been somewhat minimized in the recent model runs.  For this day, I'm eyeing a target in SW Oklahoma.  Yes, there will be storms up in Kansas and they should be supercellular, but in my opinion the true tornadic potential lies further down the dryline in Oklahoma.

A little less directional shear, but much better speed shear will help compensate for this.  Shear vectors perpendicular to the dryline should help keep things down south isolated more compared to up north where it could be more of a mess.

I'll be sending in pictures to my Facebook account as the event unfolds, so be sure to add me on there if you haven't already.

Thanks for reading, and look for more forecast posts in the coming days!  Happy chasing!

Ben Toms