Severe Weather Wednesday Night?

Since we first started eyeballing Wednesday night as a possible period that we could see severe weather, the one ingredient that was missing was instability. This morning, the NAM model says... "Hey Ryan, the air make actually get quite unstable". Let me layout some bullet points to avoid any confusion and then we will unfold this...

• The front moves through Wednesday Night.
• The bulk of the precipitation will fall Wednesday night.
• With that said, rain is possible on Wednesday during the day as warmer air moves in.
• Main threat is straight-line winds.
• Secondary threat is hail and lightning.
• Lesser threat, but still concerning is the tornado threat.
• This should be gone by daybreak on Thursday morning.

Let's take a look at the NAM for tomorrow night. This map simply shows the precip that will fall...Click to enlarge.

In the above map, you can see that we have rain, but there is not a ton of it. The above image shows how much rain will fall during that period and not a simulation of what radar will look like. Chances are, this event will come in the form of a squall line of storms. Let's talk about the instability now. This map shows the CAPE:

CAPE is simply the amount of energy available for the storms. Notice the ribbon of blue/green over Region 8. This is the unstable air. It will be a brief period, but the chance is there. The dynamics of this storm supports severe weather and if we get this instability that is advertised by the NAM, we will see some severe weather. This will be in the overnight hours, so make sure you have your weather radio turned on!

Stay tuned over the next few days. We're taking it one storm at a time, but next week we have more concerns in the weather that include more severe weather and some wintry threats.

Ryan