Severe Storms Thursday

The Storm Prediction Center has a good chunk of Arkansas flagged for severe weather on Thursday as seen above. I tend to agree with them. The current postion of the Upper-Low is seen below using SimuAWIPS. I have 500mb Heights (Upper-Level) and Water Vapor Satellite Imagery plotted. It is currently in the southwestern part of the US.

This low will shift East, give us a chance of storms on Thursday and Friday, and try to linger into the weekend to keep us cooler with a slight chance of rain. Below is the position of the low from the latest NAM model run on Saturday AM. Plotted is the 500mb Forecast heights and 500mb vorticity. You can see, the Upper-low is over us on Saturday morning and the stronger Upper-low is north of us:

As this storm system comes in, the air will become very unstable. The graph below using the BUFKIT program shows the instbility peaking on Thursday evening between 7-9PM. The time-stamp goes from right to left:

The image below is still BUFKIT and it shows several indices we look at to determine the threat of severe weather. Without getting too geeky, there are several signs pointing to severe weather on Thursday evening. The main thing is... we should be very unstable! I tweeted this earlier, but red bars are not good. :)

We'll watch it closely! I fully expect to see severe storms, I'm just hoping for no tornadoes and no more than a half inch of rain! I think the greatest risk will be large hail, but gusty winds and tornadoes are possible.

Stay tuned,

Ryan