high risk

88/70 at BWI last hour.

storms struggling south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it's a wedgefest in northwest PA. Ok, that's going overboard, but there has been at least one confirmed large tornado up there, and new warnings have now been issued in the Willamsport area.

We'll have a few warm days this week and weekend in between frontal passages, but next week looks potentially HOT. The GEFS mean 850 mb temp anomalies are in the +7 range.

There seems to be fairly good agreement in a trough coming in from the Pacific merging with the tropical thing coming out of Baja, forming a healthy sfc low in the west next week, forcing a strong ridge over the east. The 500 pattern would support 90+ here, but perhaps the wet ground will keep us a little lower. Regardless, another stretch of hot days seems fairly likely.

The shear is actually pretty fantastic. We obviously can't get anything to the ground with the stable layer in place, but I can totally envision a few elevated cells spinning tonight.

definitely. forecast soundings show some elevated instability, so while I'm not sure if we'll get lightning, a convective element to the rain is likely. The simulated radar seems to show that.

and the NAM nest has been consistent for the past 8 cycles or so.....

Agreed, especially for areas along and north of I-66 in VA and Rt 50 in MD, where there pretty good agreement on storm coverage. Also think that there should be more emphasis today on the threat for trees coming down easily in storm wind gusts, given the saturated soil.

That sums it up. Looking more closely, the last 5 (at least) NAM nest cycles show this, along with the 12z HRRR and all last night's Hi-Res Windows. It's rather impressive agreement. I'm still concerned about trees toppling easily in the saturated ground.

Multiple NAM nest cycles show storms initiating well ahead of the main squall line late Wednesday afternoon on some sort of lee trough. Instability is decent, and deep layer shear is probably sufficient for some svr gusts. Given how wet the soil is, I suspect that trees could come down even if gusts are only in the 35 kt range.

The low-level shear that favored rotation today will NOT be present tomorrow.

ah geez. UMD has a private company issue tornado warnings for their campus, independent of NWS warnings. https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/UMD-Alerts-Students-to-Tornado-That-Never-Came-131854018.html That must be what's happening again today. That couplet that's near Silver Spring now was never really on a path towards campus.

looks like a weak couplet near Takoma Park

Looking at the NAM nest and HRRR, while the greatest coverage of storms will be over the next few hours, a few more could be around later during the night. Decent shear profiles will remain in place, and instability won't drop off much in this air mass. Not sure we can rule out an isolated supercell overnight.

The trends option on the SPC mesoanalysis page suggests that some healthy low-level shear will move into the DC area later this afternoon.