Ryan's Blog: Watching Wednesday

We are watching Wednesday closely and we are trying to give everyone an advanced notice that there may be strong storms. One of my pet peeves is when there is a natural disaster, people say they did not know it was coming or they did not have a warning. By telling you that there is a chance of severe weather several days out, you can plan accordingly. We are not saying it will be worst weather of the year or that we all need to hide in our safe spots on Wednesday. We are just saying that you need to have a way to get severe weather warnings on Wednesday.

The Region 8 Storm TEAM uses a 4 part scale to communicate the risk of severe weather. There is only a Medium risk for Wednesday, but a risk that needs to be taken seriously. It's not a high or extreme risk, but if we feel that we need to bump it up over the next few days, we will.

Here are my thoughts on this Sunday morning in bullet points:

Severe weather is possible in the afternoon and evening hours of Wednesday.
Instability is not that high, but wind shear is high.
Strong winds aloft may lead to wind damage and even the chance of tornadoes.
I do anticipate severe weather watches from the Storm Prediction Center.

Let's show a few maps for you weather geeks. On Wednesday, a strong upper-low will be moving across the county. The pattern is starting to take on more of a "negative tilt" in the trough than what it appeared to have in earlier model runs. That's what has a few people more concerned this morning. I highlighted the area to watch:

Winds at about 5,000 are quite impressive. This easily exceeds our threshold of what we look for in severe storms:

I mentioned earlier that one of the limiting factors was unstable air. We measure that by looking at the CAPE or Convective Available Potential Energy. We see that the CAPE increases along the line of storms, but it is not outrageously high: