CheeselandSkies

As nice as it was to finally get on the board with a sig catch at Keota on 3/31, would appreciate a few more at least somewhat synoptically-evident regional chase opportunities that don't involve 50+ MPH storm motions. Still haven't seen a signal strong enough to take a week of PTO strictly for chasing. CFS keeps waffling about the week following Memorial Day.

If it ain't gonna in May, it might as well be like this: Tonight Mostly clear, with a low around 50. West wind around 5 mph. Tuesday A 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. Sunny, with a high near 78. West wind 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night A 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 10pm. Mostly clear, with a low around 43. Northeast wind 10 to 15 mph. Wednesday Sunny, with a high near 67. East wind 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 41. East wind 5 to 10 mph. Thursday Sunny, with a high near 75. South wind 10 to 15 mph. Thursday Night A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms, then a chance of showers after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 55. South wind around 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Friday A chance of showers, with thunderstorms also possible after 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 70. Southwest wind around 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Friday Night A 40 percent chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 50. Saturday A 30 percent chance of showers. Mostly sunny, with a high near 69. Saturday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 50. Sunday A 20 percent chance of showers. Mostly sunny, with a high near 71. Sunday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 45. Monday Sunny, with a high near 71.

Based on yesterday's Day 2 outlooks, wasn't expecting any part of WI to be in a slight risk today, lol.

There are some days where it pays to hold fast to your preconceived target area (like 3/31 for me, was planning to go to SE IA after getting off work at noon but overnight/morning of IL started to look much better according to CAMS which was tempting due to depicted later initation/slower upscale growth, would have cost me Keota that is in my avatar had I bit, as those simulated sups east of the MS formed but by and large did not produce photogenic ). Today is not one of those days. So much for OK/KS border. OK/TX border it is, for those chasing!

It's so weird to see a monster tornado on March 31, chase again four days later, then barely see a storm for another 5 weeks (would have been the entire period if not for April 20). This is why it was so hard for me to bite on early season setups at this latitude for so long (2/28/17, 3/5/22). After all, if we have trouble getting the juice for good storms up here in May...

Is the additional heavy, waterlogged snow in the UP going to melt into the upper MS watershed?

Has to be getting ready to do it, just south of Mart:

Didn't realize this until reading through NWS Chicago's summary page today, but apparently the Woodhaven Lakes campground near Amboy/Sublette, IL was hit by an EF2 on March 31st, same as they were on June 22, 2015 (same day as the Coal City-Braidwood EF3). Frame grab from my video looking toward the totally rain-wrapped 2015 tornado (small consolation for me at the time for missing Rochelle 2 months earlier).

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.