Despite a pretty meh synoptic pattern, a halfway decent, albeit somewhat moisture-deprived setup exists tomorrow across eastern Colorado.  SPC has ticked up their outlook for the region since a general risk last night, opened with a marginal, now we’re sitting at a slight.  But us high plains nerds were all over this before sunset yesterday.  Questions becomes how big a crowd does tomorrow draw?  After the insanity that was the last couple days, one can’t help but be concerned about the crowds that could amass in eastern Colorado where we lack a solid gridded road network.  So lots of people…

The grind that is 2026 continues… brief tastes of success, but so much left on the table.  The story continued this past weekend.  Seems every year I hit a slump, and it grinds the season to a halt, and I wait for something to finally push me forward.  In 2024, that grind largely held all season.  But most years, I get a break.  This weekend was another grind, another tornado closer to 500, but plenty left on the table.  Monday was the headliner day, and of course, I did everything possible to avoid tornadoes.  I won’t end up writing up…

Yesterday went about exactly as I thought it would; bottom line was a lot of messy, HP, and outflow dominated storms with a couple tornado reports sprinkled in.  I knew yesterday wasn’t a tornado day, and that was very much the case as the few that were spotted/reported were all very brief and largely lacking any real visual pizazz.  The storm I was on did produce a briefy to my southeast, but I was dilly-dallying in the 2″+ hail and navigating a ‘minimum maintenance’ road after the soaking hail core rolled through.  I spent the backhalf of the active chase…

Target continues to shift further east today; a nice break given I start here in Kansas City.  Morning surface analysis shows absolute trash dewpoints this morning across northeast Colorado, southwest Nebraska, and northwest Kansas.  And you can see on the surface map above, there aren’t favorable wind directions to bring up those juicier numbers.  You’ll likely see SOME rise out there, but not enough, even by high plains standards, to make a viable target out there.  I have NO IDEA why SPC maintained their 5% tornado probs out there, but I would be shocked if they were not removed in…

Tomorrow is likely NOT a tornado day… I will just get that out of the way right now… yes, there probably will be a couple that sneak their way into the reports, but overall, I think tomorrow is likely gonna be a damaging wind and hail day.  Today, I wussed out; nothing about today was highly anticipated, and most of the better parameters shifted well north and east, and anything I was going to get on early evening was taking me the opposite direction I needed to go, so I threw a couple chips on some convection that tried to…

Good morning from Columbia, MO… packing up and loading up, bout ready to push myself back to the west a bit to set up for today; nothing high-end today, more along the lines of ‘since I am here’; a lowish-end, damaging wind cluster of storms expected to fire late afternoon/early evening across southeast Nebraska/southwest Iowa and push southeast into northwest Missouri.  How much effort I put in to today remains to be seen; today never was a major setup, and that hasn’t really changed.  But I am here, and was here by default, so we’re plotting for it either way.…