Well, today was kinda difficult. We knew last night that one of two things was going to happen in western Oklahoma: sunny blue skies or violent tornadic supercells. This morning we were all ready to stay in eastern Colorado where we'd spent the night, until we saw on the high resolution short term models that a violent supercell was supposed to break out some time between 4-6 pm. We booked it down from Limon, CO to near Woodward, OK, roughly a 7 hour drive. Fearing that we weren't going to make it far enough south in time, we stopped briefly for lunch at McDonald's near WaKeeney, KS and then continued on our way.
We arrived in Woodward at around 5pm CDT and waited...and waited...and waited. Until finally we realized that storms in western OK were not to be today. A midlevel cold air intrusion prevented the area from destabilizing as well as it should've and every storm that tried to go up would hit that cool stable air and die. After waiting for roughly an hour, we were on our way to Wichita where we are staying the night.
Tomorrow looks very good, with tornadoes definitely a possibility. A strong 500mb jet stream, in conjunction with a strong >35kt low level jet and CAPE values up near 2000 J/kg should be great for supercell development, and mid 60's dewpoints along and west of the bulging dryline will (hopefully) aid in tornado development somewhere in south central KS.
More to come tomorrow.
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