Wednesday – Two Rounds Possible

When you’re looking at SPC outlooks, the new day starts at 7am. So our chance for overnight storms is represented by a Slight Risk outlook in Day 1 (today). The rest of us see overnight storms as being tomorrow

I haven’t looked at it in detail, but my feel is that overnight will bring us some borderline-severe hail in the Wichita area, off storms moving in from Oklahoma along with the front.

Tomorrow looks to me like a warm-front play. Those situations have been good to Matt and me in the past year – most of the activity we recorded last year was related to north-moving fronts. Some of the parameters look pretty impressive around Wichita in the mid to late afternoon – nothing like yesterday, but still nice, from a chasing point of view.

I am not planning to go into any more detail on the setup at this point – 20 minutes of glancing at a couple of models is just not enough for me to hang my hat on. I won’t be surprised to see us hanging around Wichita, give or take 50 miles, tomorrow.

Hopefully the models, especially the RUC, will have the same kind of handle on tomorrow they had on yesterday, as I don’t think Matt or I will have the time to do the detailed forecasting we did for yesterday’s event. Between the two of us, I know of at least 7 hours’ forecasting work over the weekend and yesterday that went into our decision-making process.

Speaking of which, a big thanks to ICT Lead Forecaster Brad Ketcham, who talked with us multiple times while home caring for a sick young’n. His forecast hints helped us verify out thinking and he was a big help during the heat of things yesterday afternoon, when we were trying to get in behind the tornado, fighting equipment problems, and outrunning a hail core. As with all these things, it takes a team effort to get it done safely.

Look for a brief post in the morning – with the apparently earlier start, I doubt I’ll have a lot of time for detail, but I’ll update on the target thinking, at least!