Forecast
Friday
I’m not going to put much in to Friday’s forecast right now. I think LCL’s are too high down south for tornado and they aren’t exactly low up in the NE Colorado target/NW Kansas/SW Nebraska. I think 60 degree dewpoints is a pipe dream. Upper 50’s are reasonable, but if there are wide spread 60 plus dewpoints I will be shocked.
Mid level flow sucks up to 500mb, but good directional shear and moderate instability will be favorable for supercells. I don’t think there are going to be many tornadoes and if there are I think they’ll be small and or weak. I’d take a weak tornado in a second, but I don’t want to drive that far for a slim chance at a weak tornado.
Saturday
This has been a tough forecast. The cap is tough to judge. I still don’t know whether or not I am going to chase. I think I am finally starting to become content with the idea of playing up towards the warm front, but I’m going to hedge my bets with my initial target, which is going up to Hebron and then adjust west over towards Red Cloud before heading up towards Hastings and then I’ll fine tune the forecast from there. That or I’m not going to chase at all. The cap is going to decide that for me. I just hope I don’t get it wrong one way or another. It’s all going to depend on the location of the surface boundary. I’m going to play the warm front though.
There are some significant differences on the location of surface features between the NAM and GFS, but I’ll lean towards the NAM for now since the GFS has been all over the place already. We still have a few more runs to figure it out anyway.
Hopefully a storm can ride the warm front while staying somewhat discrete. Storm motions and the frontal boundary are pretty close to parallel, so there should hopefully be enough residence time for a storm developing on the warm side of the front to get going before moving in to the weaker CAPE. With good deep layer shear and moderate CAPE the environment should be favorable for supercells. SRH is quite good along the boundary, so obviously the key to tornadoes is going to be with storms riding along the front. The exception to this is if a storm can manage to fire along the dryline over central or southern Kansas, but that isn’t looking likely right now.
