KSStorm Blog

An out-of-band com­mend from a friend con­cern­ing this morning’s post made me feel the need to clar­ify some­thing I said in each of the last two posts. That’s the com­ments about pat­terns that look like cer­tain his­tor­i­cal tor­nado days.

See, I’m a pat­tern per­son. I don’t have but a smat­ter­ing of mete­o­ro­log­i­cal back­ground, and any knowl­edge I have is the result of watch­ing oth­ers and the pat­terns of the atmos­phere. That and a lit­tle read­ing inthe past few years.

So when I say the pat­tern for resem­bles May 3, 1999, I’m not really say­ing I think the out­come will be the same. I’m say­ing the fore­casts, at least accord­ing to the mod­els I believe and the pat­terns my mind rec­og­nizes sub­con­sciously, indi­cate the high­est prob­a­bil­ity for severe weather in a pat­tern that is like May 3rd. In other words, I buy into a solu­tion that has big storms in both Okla­homa and Kansas, about 90 min­utes to 2 hours’ drive apart, includ­ing strong, long-lived tornadoes.

Do I think either Moore or Haysville are gonna get clob­bered again? As of this moment, no. Oth­ers have said this bears resem­blance to the US 160 out­breaks in 2004. I men­tioned a pass­ing resem­blance to the Andover tor­nado yesterday.

I think what this really means is that all the ingre­di­ents are there. The way they are set­ting up resem­bles, in some fash­ion, aspects of one or more of those days. But this *is* fore­cast­ing, and we *are* talk­ing about the atmos­phere. The devil is in the sub­tle details we *can’t* fore­cast until 6–8 hours before storms fire, if then. Any one of a laun­dry list of things changes in the wrong way and we get noth­ing. A cou­ple of them change the other way and we have a major problem.

The take­away is that tomor­row is not a day to be com­pla­cent about. If you are in the I-35/135 cor­ri­dor give or take 90 min­utes’ drive, south of I-70, you should be aware of your sur­round­ings and how they are chang­ing between about 3pm and 10pm tomorrow.

BTW: The mod­els came into a lit­tle bet­ter agree­ment at 12z (7am). In Kansas they are nar­row­ing down the area of poten­tial, IMO. They are also ele­vat­ing the Okla­homa poten­tial. I don’t see a rea­son to shift tar­get­ing much yet. My line to be some­where along at ini­ti­a­tion is some­where in the Clear­wa­ter to King­man vicinity…depending a lot on what hap­pens tonight and through 1pm tomorrow.