Severe Threat Tue. PM into Wed. AM

Today is the day that I get back into the groove. It's Monday, all 6 of us are healthy, and I plan to be at work all week!

So, I come back to work and we have this to deal with tomorrow... A strong cold front with many of the ingredients for severe weather. Here's the setup for tomorrow night. This shows the rainfall:

As with any big storm system, I like to list some bullet points to avoid any confusion and to answer most of your questions. Here they are:

• Timing appears to be late Tuesday through Wednesday at sunrise.
• Most likely time for severe weather is 8PM-Midnight
• Main severe weather threat is WIND. Hail to a lesser degree and tornadoes. 
• Tornadoes are possible and tornado watches are expected.
• Heavy rain is also possible. Most places get 1-2" of rain, some places 3-4"
• Threat includes everyone. No specific area in Region 8. 

As I dig through the data this morning, I am torn between being glad that the peak of the storm is in the middle of the night. On one hand, the lack of daytime heating may limit the storms, but on the other hand people will be sleeping if tornadoes DO occur. If you have a weather radio, make sure you turn it on.

A lot of times when we look at the severe weather setup, we look at CAPE. CAPE is a measurement of the energy needed for storms to occur. The NAM model is showing decent CAPE with the storm system tomorrow evening, despite it being in the middle of the night:

If you notice, it is showing an area of 800-900 /kg over parts of Region 8. This time of the year, I get concerned when we have CAPE over 400 or so, when given the dynamics we will also have in place. I'm not going to dig into this too much, but a lot of the indices we use to flag for severe weather are in the elevated range for tomorrow night:

 I'm running short on time because I'm heading out to Wynne to speak to a group at Wynne Baptist, but will continue to update you on any changes via Twitter.

Have a a good day!

Ryan