Day 12: A New Day!

As you know, we had our briefing at 9:30 a.m. this morning to discuss today's itinerary. Our plan today is to find supercells! Now, with most storms, there are positives and negatives. The positives for chasing today are extreme instability, quality shear, and the combination of both that will cause beast supercells.  The negative, however, is that there is no discernible focused upper level mechanism. This basically means there are uplift mechanisms for storm development; however, it is over a broad area which causes uncertainty where a storm will form. So, in essence, we are confident that storms will form but not where. Although pinpointing a place is very difficult, we have decided to stay in Ponca City, OK, so that we can continue to monitor the situation. It looks like storms will develop somewhere from southeast Kansas, through Ponca City and Oklahoma City, OK, to Gainesville, TX. We are more focused on southeast Kansas due to the SPC Convective Outlooks seen below...









Another issue regarding chasing today is the positioning of the dryline. Ideally, we would like the dryline to remain as far west as possible because the further east you go the harder it is to chase due to terrain purposes like hills and the Ozarks. As far as the dryline, in general, it could be enough for storms to form; however, yesterday was the perfect example of the dryline not being sufficient. All we can do is sit and wait to see... Good thing is that we will not struggle with instability, cape, or moisture today. It is funny because in our first storm chase days, we were praying for 50 degree dewpoints, and now we are easily getting 65-70 degree dewpoints. I am glad that moisture made its way back into the region.

As far as storm motion, if or when storms do form, the storms will be slow moving, which is a huge positive. It is likely storms will move northeast at 10-15 knots, or 15-20 mph. This will make it easy to chase and watch when we get on a storm.

To sum up today's potential, it looks like the main threat will be HUGE hail (possibly grapefruit size hail), strong winds, and the possibility of isolated tornadoes. The hatched markings indicate 2 inch diameter hail stones or greater and EF-2 or greater tornadoes.

We will brief again at 11:45a.m. and discuss our next step. We will either get on the road or continue to monitor the situation in Ponca City, OK. I will keep you posted on our position and any other details as they come. Stay tuned because today is looking good!