KSStorm Blog

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!

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.

Decided to take an after­noon and go on a solo chase. North­ern KS, maybe a county or two into NE. I’m stream­ing, if you’re interested.

Thought I’d take a stab here and see if there are any soft­ware coders fol­low­ing the blog feeds. Specif­i­cally, I need some­one who may be inter­ested in help­ing found a com­pany. I have sev­eral ideas for soft­ware that will help con­nect radio & TV sta­tions to the Real-Time web – in most cases their present con­tent man­age­ment tools just don’t cut it. Real Time News Link is a plug-in that would enable their con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems to exchange infor­ma­tion directly with web back­ends and the Real-Time web (Twit­ter, Face­book and so forth).

I’m head­ing to Dal­las next week­end for Star­tup­Week­end – over three days, sev­eral peo­ple band together around var­i­ous ideas and build com­pa­nies. I’d be will­ing to spring for the gas and your event ticket if you’d be will­ing to come help me recruit a team of coders to put out a pro­to­type of the appli­ca­tion by Sun­day night. To keep the topic form get­ting too off-target, I’ll refer you to the RTNewsLink web­site to find out more about the project. Or email me to find out more.

See­ing as how it’s Easter and the risk area is 3 hours away, Matt & I have decided to spend the after­noon with fam­ily instead of chas­ing. Of couse, the way *my* fam­ily is, a fam­ily chase may be in the off­ing. Or we may just write it off & charge up for tomor­row & Tues­day. Happy Easter!