CheeselandSkies

*New member, longtime lurker and refugee from the veritable ghost towns of TalkWeather and Stormtrack here. I held off on joining because I despise the Eastern snow weenies and their subforums which fragment the discussion for severe threats, but it seems the knowledgeable severe people only post on this site* Brutal. No way I thought this severe season could be delayed as bad as 2014, since that year featured the winter that wouldn't die. This year we had plenty of warm, pleasant (sometimes unseasonably so) weather here in the Midwest from February through April, but we rarely "paid" for it the way that I expected. The one day we did (February 28, significant tornadoes up to I-80 in IL), I had a prior commitment because it didn't even occur to me that chasing would be a possibility in this region in February. Copied and pasted from what I just posted on Stormtrack: Well, I went ahead and took Monday morning off to keep open the option of chasing in the northern or central Plains Sunday evening. Whether I actually go or not remains to be seen. It continues to look darn near gorgeous on the GFS if you just look at the CAPE and surface pattern, but at 500mb things get a lot more iffy. The trough hangs back well to the west and the 500mb southwesterlies are 25-35kt at best over the warm sector. The big question is, do the favorable factors (namely CAPE and low-level directional shear) compensate resulting in slow-moving, easily chaseable supercells, or do you have insufficient mid-level shear and thus disorganized, marginally severe multicells? Capping also remains a concern although I think it should be breakable at least in some areas. I'd rather have that than too little cap and everything going up at once in a convective mess which we have seen all too often thus far this year. Low-level directional shear, SRH and hodograph critical angles look excellent along the warm front and near the triple point, which is another thing that has been lacking in many setups we've seen this year. Anyone remember what the 500mb winds and capping looked like on Bowdle day? As I recall, that was a pretty low-key risk setup (slight/5%) that paid off big time. I don't recall 500 mb winds being that strong on Dodge City or Chapman day last year, either. Monday is pretty much my only option since I'd be a huge jerk asking my coworkers to take extra days or work shorthanded again more than that so soon after what was supposed to be my chasecation, so any potentially better days later in the week are off the table for me until/unless something presents itself locally as the trough ejects toward the upper Midwest toward next Thursday/Friday/Saturday.