CheeselandSkies

Why hello there.

Hurricane and land-based severe convective weather/tornado chasing are rather different animals. Tornadoes develop on much shorter timescales and may not always develop, even from a seemingly intense supercell in favorable conditions. With hurricane chasing, you know you're going to have a storm. With tornadoes, they and their parent supercells haven't formed yet when you make your target. You don't have days of modeling their potential tracks, they can take sudden turns (See: El Reno) but more often than not move with the parent supercells. The objective of tornado chasing usually isn't to put yourself in the core of strongest winds, unless you're in a vehicle like the TIV or Dominator (Again, see: El Reno). With tornadoes, you don't have to contend with surge, and you usually don't run the risk of being trapped in a disaster area for potentially several days, with blocked roads, no power, and no open gas stations for 50 miles in any direction.

I'll say it again, no Cat 2 has a perfectly formed stadium eye fully surrounded by deep convection, WMG eye temp on Dvorak, and produces the kind of "white-out" video footage coming out of Michael. Looks very comparable to other high-end 4 landfalls of recent years such as Maria and Patricia. Oh, and I suppose Cat 2s have pressure in the 920s (not even at the center of the eye) and impress guys like Josh and other chasers who have been in some of the strongest landfalls of the decade. ...but I suspect these are the kind of folks who aren't going to be convinced by data, so I'm wasting my digital breath.

Although it pales in comparison to all the excitement with Michael, I went on a spur-of-the-moment chase yesterday afternoon and got on the little cell near Arena/Spring Green, WI just as it was tornado-warned. The updraft tower and striated base can be seen in this video from my dash-mounted GoPro. A few scans showed a bit of a couplet but there was nothing confirmed from it.

Meanwhile downgraded here in WI despite more sunshine than I thought this AM...nearly overcast now though. It smells like spring outside which feels very strange with the trees beginning to turn. HRRR is bouncing around like mad every hour with the location of potential discrete rotating cells in S. WI, but what it does tell me is I need to keep a close watch on radar trends later this afternoon.

Things have overachieved a bit this morning with that QLCS in central OK.

Quite a bit more sunshine than I expected around here this morning. Clouds off to the west also have that "convectivey" look - not too common in October around these parts.

With the rivers and lakes around the upper Midwest already as swollen as they are, I'm getting nervous for what's going to happen next spring if we get a lot of snow this coming winter.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/md/md1519.html LOL, guess this was the other 20 percent. 3 more months...

MD now out saying watch incoming for southern WI. Things finally look to be firing off around the Twin Cities. That earlier cluster that produced some hail in NC WI I suspect was elevated. Problem is there's less than an hour of daylight left. We shall see but I suspected SPC's strong wording was once again overblown given the lack of CAM support, and I haven't seen anything yet to shake that suspicion.

Not sure why SPC expanded the risk areas at 13Z (Madison now solidly in the slight/5% TOR). Latest HRRR not at all bullish on strong UH except in the UP (northwest of the enhanced risk), elevated and close to/after dark. Latest 3K NAM has a clusterfest/possible derecho for NE WI. This should be leaf peeping season up there. Really hard to believe a severe threat today let alone a greater one 300 miles north of here feeling the cool air outside this morning.

Meanwhile, instead of cool leaf peeping weather northern WI gets the enhanced risk for severe weather tomorrow while we are in the slight, after the warm front couldn't even make it north of the state line yesterday (not that it would have mattered).

I didn't see the couplet, but I don't like the juxtaposition of "...large and extremely dangerous" with "radar indicated rotation." IMO you need ground truth to use wording like that.

HRRR continues to lean toward soaker tonight but zzzzzzzzzzzzzfest for severe. Calendar still says 2018...

Of course 11 and 12Z HRRR want to put the only thing resembling a possible warm-sector supercell through Jo Daviess County, the worst chase terrain in northern Illinois (and the only part without a proper grid road network). Even that aside, the CAMs are not particularly encouraging. Looks like a dreary fall afternoon at home unless things change drastically.

Where was that in May (or April...or June)?

The normally (over)bullish 3K NAM says meh. Lots of showers, nil updraft helicity until after dark (elevated).

Nice little LEWP in Iowa with some embedded/leading supercells...but it'll whiff me to the south...again. All the severe weather this year has been either south of the state line or north in the forests.

Quite a bit more sun here than I expected today. The Iowa line now has a warning on it for wind, moving at 50.

Full sunshine here now for about the last 15 minutes. That won't last long though going by visible. That line in central Iowa looks fairly robust with a lot of lightning output per RadarScope, although no warnings yet.

Yeah, HRRR has been consistent with some pretty stout cells within the line that'll move through this afternoon from IA into S. WI. More of a discrete mode out east where SPC has the 5% probs but not much in the way of updraft helicity being shown. It's been a "bright overcast" here in Madison most of the morning. Clouds are thin enough that the camera at the top of our 1,400' broadcast tower at work can see blue sky.

I'm looking for the tornado outbreak on the afternoon of the 29th...

Exceedingly rare to get a westward moving tornado. These cases of landfalling westward-moving TCs are about the only time.

Last week I remarked to a coworker that it seemed the difference between this and the June 2008 river flooding event was that one was upper Midwest-wide, whereas this year's was totally Wisconsin-centric. It would appear that is no longer the case.