Waking up this morning in Grand Island after yesterday’s football-filled drive (Washington lost to the Eagles by 2 in a more competitive game than I figured, but a loss is a loss), about 2-3 hours from my early afternoon target.  As usual, I will land in that target by 3pm, which probably oughta be more than enough time to settle and wait for the afternoon show.

I probably should post a current grab of the radar, but that’s more effort than this Monday morning is going to get out of me.  Trust me when I say there is a LOT of rain/storms along the Missouri River from Omaha into Iowa, which is one of MANY issues plaguing what would otherwise be a pretty solid chase setup.  We knew this going in, there was never any real doubt in waking up to a complicated forecast today, and we have just that.  It’s 9am CDT now, so it’s gonna take a quick recovery in the wake of these storms for things to start making sense.

We’ve heard this a million times this year, the environment in place supports significant severe weather, including the potential for strong tornadoes…

BUT…

And that’s today in a nutshell… the parameters in place could support significant severe weather, but will recovery happen in time, will storms stay isolated long enough, will storm be surfaced based… the list goes on and on.  And 99 times out of 100 this year, the buts have won out to some degree or another.  It’s basically having all the ingredients for an awesome cake spread out across the kitchen counter with an oven pre-heating to 400… but you don’t put the ingredients together correctly, you forget an ingredient, or add too much or too little, or you don’t cook it long enough and set the temperature too low.  That’s today… a lot is there, but there are a lot more failure modes than there are successes, and while the potential is there, will it be realized.

And that’s what I am here to find out… it’s September 4, the chase chances are going to dwindle heading into the winter, and this is a reasonable distance for a setup of this caliber, so we shall see.  My gut, which is probably the one thing in my body right now I SHOULD be paying more attention to, isn’t terribly high on today, but there are hi-rez models that do play out the ‘all the ingredients come together’ scenario, so we’ll put the chips on the table and see what hand Ma-Nature deals.

Right now, my plan is to sit tight, probably a milk-the-checkout morning here in Grand Island, then slide my way to the east.  It’s hard to fight the urge to wanna get on the other side of the river into Iowa, maybe over to Missouri Valley, but I think if the window were to exist, it’s gonna be early and probably be in Nebraska.  That being said, I’m leaning toward Blair, about 2.5 hours, which means if I am mobile by noon, I will get there in plenty of time, and if Iowa looks legit, I can zip over there via US-30 with no issues.

So that said, a big boom/bust type of day with more busts than booms, but all it takes is one boom, so folks in the risk area today, stay weather aware!  I’ll be out to do my part to chase away the storms haha