CheeselandSkies

Speaking of Iowa, decent amount of sunshine across the 5% area this morning.

Iowa: Home of the 2% or less gorgeous tornadoes and moderate risk/PDS slopfests or cap busts.

April always seems like it should produce more high-end severe weather (think Palm Sunday '65, 1991 or 2011 but further north/west, Rochelle-Fairdale '15) but more often turns out like this year (more snow than January lol). Seems like September used to be a definite fall month when I was growing up (I remember many a day in the early part of the school year waiting for the bus in cold rain) but lately has behaved more like just an extension of summer.

This could be disastrous. River flooding on the Kickapoo and Baraboo Rivers in WI is already rivaling June 2008 levels in some areas. Many of the same communities have been inundated. Only thing missing is a big/destructive breach like happened at Lake Delton.

06Z 3K NAM has a Stoughton tornado redux for Tuesday evening, lol.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/watch/ww0351.html Finally, only 6 hours after the MD.

Sooooooo what happened to this tornado watch they were going to issue? lol https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/md/md1361.html #Still2018

Major flash flooding not far from me overnight. MKX suspects western Dane County set a WI record for 24-hour rainfall. Multiple water rescues and one confirmed fatality so far. Fortunately for me my apartment building is on a bit of a rise, so our parking lot was clear and I was able to get out and go to work. I have to check when I get home but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of water in the basement, though. Some communities just to the west of Madison were evacuated due to flooding of Black Earth Creek, and remain cut off this morning due to washouts and bridge damage along US 14.

Keeping an eye on potential for more flash flooding around southern WI today after some localized areas were hit hard on Friday. Severe hopes aren't high but we did get put back into the marginal risk on the 13Z. Day 4-8 hints at increasing chances by Friday into next weekend. Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

Don't forget the tornado outbreak that hit Iowa with four EF2+ on July 19 with a 2% area in place until it was already underway. To be fair, the setups have been kind of subtle/conditional. But still even I as a rank amateur thought there was a good chance July 19th would overperform the outlook looking at conditions that morning. Unfortunately because the quality of the setup wasn't apparent until then, I hadn't scheduled time off and had to work until noon, then a social obligation later in the afternoon. Reading this and some other forums that day, I wasn't the only one who had alarm bells go off in their head when we saw the clearing ahead of that triple point, combined with the HRRR and 3K NAM consistently depicting discrete convection with strong updraft helicity tracks for later in the day. Honestly I feel the SPC should be the best in the business of forecasting short to medium range severe convective weather events, after all that is their one and only mission. If they are indeed the best we've got, maybe the science hasn't come as far as we think.

lol, they put the area in a marginal risk then 13 minutes later issue a severe thunderstorm watch. Quite low probabilities in that watch, too. Honestly not sure why they issued it.

Annnnnd it's gone.

Keeping an eye on Monday but the mediocre at best forecast lapse rates are a red flag to me.

GFS has been consistent for a couple days now of wanting to bring a strong reservoir of instability back over the upper Midwest/Great Lakes for the 8/4-8/7 range, coincident with a decent (especially by summer standards) belt of W-WNW 500 mb flow. Forecast soundings suggest capping might be an issue, at least on Saturday the 4th, but of course the details are always up in the air at this range. At the very least, conditions should be there for some severe wind-producing convective complexes, and of course something could surprise like on July 19th.

More like SPC pulled the trigger on them...but it was a blank.

MKX broke its several hundred day tornado watch-less streak on July 1st...and there were 0 tornadoes confirmed in the area on that day. Several weak ones occurred earlier in the year on days with no watch in effect.

00z GFS has a spring like (or what should be a spring like-not this past spring!) surface pattern around 180-200 hours with a low in the Rockies and southerly flow in the Plains. However the 500mb pattern doesn't match, with that pesky ridge in the Southwest.

Ugh. With that kind of heat building over the southern Plains, you know it is coming back to the Midwest eventually.

Radar over Iowa lit up pretty good. New blue box includes Madison, although complex crossing the MS is mostly sub-severe ATTM. Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

I have to suspect low-level shear wasn't much if any better in SW WI on Tuesday, with much less impressive instability parameters. Sometimes the atmosphere just behaves oddly and things happen on such a small scale they can't be resolved by any model. How many times have we seen big honking supercells struggle to produce tornadoes because the dewpoint was 2 degrees too low, or the RFD too wet, or not enough 0-1km SRH, while those teeny little thundershowers spun them up like nobody's business?

Tornado probs slashed back to 5% at 1630Z without explanation. Marginal wind probs expanded into WI, just barely touching Madison.

About time that happened at least once in 2018.

MDT risk incoming per activity loop graphic. Site says 13Z was issued 15 minutes ago but nothing else has updated.

Tube near Argyle was actually rather pretty per video. I never saw much if any clearing make it into WI ahead of those little cells on visible so not sure what they found that they liked.

Still got this teensie little tornado warned cell coming up at me. Lmao.