CheeselandSkies

Let's not.

Up to slight risk/5% prob. Cloud breaks showing up in southwest Wisconsin.

Getting some decent filtered sunshine in Madison early this morning. That big area of rain pushing through IA is a problem for late afternoon supercells, though. Action of the day might be if enough instability builds to allow the leading edge of that to intensify.

It's like Grand Island's Night of the Twisters for central Oklahoma.

Surprising to me that the leaders at PdC are 1965 and 2001, and La Crosse those years and 1952/69. In my mind 1993 and 2008 are the benchmarks of major river flooding in the upper Midwest, particularly the Mississippi.

Disgusting.

Earlier GFS runs had the low/cold front a little slower, starting with today's 12Z it screams through at 18Z Thursday. Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

Yeah, I was looking at that on the 12Z GFS and thinking the same thing about SPC's outlook. It's odd because I thought the knock on Broyles was that he's almost always excessively bullish on severe potential. The main caveat is if the low is occluding/weakening by the time it gets into the region Thursday afternoon/evening which looks like a possibility. However the GFS still has it at 994 MB at 21Z Thursday with the warm front well up into WI (probably too far north, as you mentioned). The think I like is it shows the left exit region of the 500mb jet punching out over the warm sector just ahead of the triple point, when with most setups it wants to linger behind the warm sector during peak heating. That in my mind is one of those synoptic-level red flags that if it's present, overrides a lot of other concerns like moisture, potential for mode issues, etc (3/31 being a major recent example).

@andyhb Exactly. There's been a lot more discussion/debate-sometimes-verging into trolling about this topic on the "other forum", but what exactly are we trying to accomplish here? Are we trying to rate tornadoes to determine how strong they get, how often, where, and when (which is what I once thought); or to prove...what, exactly about construction engineering around the USA?

Random SVR out for Dodge County, WI for a teensy little hailer.

Sounds like your average April in the Midwest!

This guy right here.

DVN has added the video still I offered them (same as my avatar) to their 3/31 event page. https://www.weather.gov/dvn/summary_03312023

Yeah, we got lucky in that the active storm pattern pretty much shut down after the 4/4-4/5 event. In 2008 we had a big melt followed by relentless thunderstorm (including training MCS) activity for about three weeks straight from late May into June.

This is getting into a whole OT can of worms but IMO this is bogus because it was said when the EF-scale was adopted that it would be a 1:1 changeover from the original Fujita scale, I.E. an F0 then would be an EF0 now, and so on all the way on up. Obviously in practice that's not true because the definitive descriptor of F5 damage was "strong frame houses lifted off foundations and carried considerable distances to disintegrate...". Now of course, not all frame houses are created equal and "strong" is subjective so applying some engineering standards and scientific rigor isn't a bad idea, but the pendulum has swung too far, in some cases very much too far in that direction. Now, I agree with @andyhb that Vilonia 2014 is the most egregious case of this (just ahead of Chickasha and Goldsby, OK 5/24/2011), and set a bad precedent to the point where it's gone way beyond the understandable challenges with determining the difference between EF4 and EF5 based on the engineering quality of a structure that no longer exists, and resulted in suspiciously lowballed ratings much further down the scale (to the point where in some cases we've seen the sweeping away of frame homes initially rated as low as EF2, which is outside the bounds of the scale, before being "corrected" to low-end EF3).

July 1995 is one of those rare weather months that stands out in my memory. At the time we lived in a house with two window A/C units, one in the living room and one in my parents' bedroom which they didn't like to use because they didn't trust the wiring up there (1920's house with one two-prong outlet per bedroom, except the master which had two, my dad upgraded all the wiring on the first floor but never got around to the second before we moved out). I don't think nine-year-old me wore a shirt outside of school all month. Fans going full blast in every room and almost nightly thunderstorms. Good times.

This is something I just learned recently from watching Trey Greenwood's videos but this is a good, stark example here. The hodograph shape will resemble the radar structure of supercells that form in the shear environment it represents. We can see how the hodograph folds back on itself in the upper levels, and thus how the storm's forward-flank core curls out ahead of the tornado's path. This can make for not-great viewing conditions even though the rear flank is fairly well separated from the core and not "rain-wrapped" in the stereotypical HP fashion. Something similar was observed at Louisville, MS the following day. OTOH the storm I chased in Iowa on March 31 formed in an environment with much less clockwise curvature in the upper levels, the hodograph went straight out to the northeast and very little rain fell in the eventual path of the tornado as the storm's core skirted by to the north.

They've finally corrected/updated the survey to reflect the fact that a cycle occurred just southwest of Keota. So it's now properly two tornadoes, one EF3, one EF4. https://www.weather.gov/dvn/summary_03312023

Gotta love spring in the Midwest.

Reedited my footage to cut out most of the low-contrast approach of the original Ottumwa/Farson tornado, refined my contrast adjustments on some of the shots and actually added a couple seconds to the shot crossing 92 which I had cut when I didn't really need to.

We palmin' now.

Kinda interesting that they haven't seen fit to use it since, even with the extreme conditions of 4/27/11 or that infamous HRRR simulation on 5/20/19.

Do they still have the Ottumwa-Keota-Kalona family as a single EF4 path?

Western Plains especially Kansas desperately need rain. That said it's relatively not too bad further SW in the more traditional EML source region, so kind of a mixed signal for the rest of chase season.

Well, I couldn't catch lightning (or a tornado) in a bottle twice in a row. Spent the afternoon moseying on down from Dubuque to Mt. Pleasant. Didn't want to commit to the stuff further west in Iowa because I thought the mixing problems would kill tornado potential with it. Finally decided to start making my way east on 34 into IL while the seemingly disorganized convective cluster was coming out of MO just to my south. My main goal at this point was just to stay out of any heavy rain/hail from it and start making my way home. Of course this is when it finally got its act together and went tornado warned, but there was no way I could get a view of the base without driving directly through the core, so I just continued heading home. Elevated hailers kept firing all around making for a decent lightning show, but I managed to avoid nearly all precip on the drive up US-67 to the Quad Cities, then north on 61 back to Dubuque and 151 home. Didn't sting nearly as bad as it would have without Friday, though.