Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

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.

Tomorrow (Saturday) starts what I would say are the upper-end days… tomorrow being the lower of the next three.  Sunday and Monday in particular, both look high-end, and some of the AI outputs for Monday are maxed out across, you guessed it, Iowa.  Saturday will be a haul across Kansas on I-70, probably serving focus on the areas along and just north of the KS/NE border on the western ends of the states.  Then it’s a burn across I-80 into eastern Nebraska for Sunday, then we’ll head to Iowa for Monday.  Tuesday remains viable, a mop-up day as I called it, and then barring something significant happening midweek, may try and squeeze a few days at home.  What looked like a pretty solid, consistent stretch may break up a bit.  Am definitely NOT terribly upset with the prospects of spending a couple days at home between this stint and the next one, but we’ll see.  Tuesday may not even warrant the effort, but it is far enough away and buried deep behind much higher-end setups, so not going to stress about that yet.

So yeah, we’re rocking and rolling… gonna finish loading up and point myself west.  Hoping for a much less eventful trip today as yesterday, yet again, I ended up seeing another horrendous wreck, this time east of Kansas City on I-70 near Odessa.  Seems like every trip I take, I see one of these… never forget, the most dangerous part of chasing isn’t the weather, it’s the driving… be safe out there, y’all!

The May-a-Thon Adventure begins Friday… today I’ll be eastbound toward KC and that leaves me sitting pretty to kick things off tomorrow afternoon. Low-end setup with models back and forth on daytime development north of KC. Saturday begins the ramp up, with Sunday and Monday on paper the headliners.

Busy stretch… but excited to be back at it.  See ya under a storm… if not Friday, then most likely Saturday haha

After a relatively quiet start to May, things are looking to pick back up.  SPC has already highlighted both weekend days, and it would not shock me to see additional outlooks starting as early as Friday and continuing well into next week.  I will likely deploy for the weekend setups, and once out, will remain out until a series of down days take hold.  The pattern is definitely shifting into active May mode, and thus we may be looking at a trip involving a laundry day haha

Tomorrow is a car day… I took a rock to the windshield that’s now got a growing crack.  Fortunately my Ascent purchase included a once-a-year windshield replacement for road debris (NOT hail), so I get to NOT spend $1,500 to get that replaced tomorrow.  If hail was part of the coverage, I’d be more inclined to wait it out, but given the conditions of the agreement, it’s best I do it now.  Not sure when I took the rock impact, but I noticed it Sunday extending outside my windshield mount.  Also, my local Subaru dealership tossed me a coupon for a $30 oil change, so I’ll get that done as well just to reset ahead of this trip despite it being about 1,000 miles early.  But I am not about to pass up a local $30 oil change verses $100+ on the road, which I will easily surpass the mileage deadline within the first couple days.

Anywoo, just wanted to quick jot here while I was waiting for some things to approve for the piece I am doing today… speaking of today…

HAPPY 22 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THIS DAY…

I’ll refrain from posting this on social media, even as it would be easy clickbait… not sure I’m ready to reduce myself for that yet.  But my blog, I can do whatever I want..

Obviously this is NOT a forecast, this is NOT me saying “holy shit, snow is coming in two weeks”… this is me saying it’s 2026 and I would NOT be surprised in the least if we still had one more snow in the tank.  This far out, clearly I’m nowhere near excited to even think about the idea, but I just get a kick out of the fact that models still pump out a shot.  This would fall very well in line with how goofy a year it’s been here between 90s in March, Snow in May, historic low snow all season, virtually no severe weather season, etc.  So while I have zero faith in this scenario, I would be far from surprised if another snow were to come to the Front Range.  Again, four years ago in 2022, we saw a hefty snow on May 20-21.  So it ain’t out of the question… I guess the question would be, when was the last time we saw measurable snow TWICE in the same May?  Unlikely we say 2026…

Saturday was a day I had on my radar for most of the week, mainly cause it was probably gonna offer up my only real chance to chase anything within a very quiet severe weather window.  Initially, I was eyeballing central Kansas, but as the day approached, the better setup started to shift further south into Oklahoma, and it just wasn’t anything I wanted to make that kind of effort for.  Briefly, I had considered the play as there was a Sunday play in north Texas, but both days looked like hail risks over anything particularly tornadic, and with me not wanting to extend myself, still kinda getting my brain right, I decided nah on both.  Until Saturday morning… I got up a bit late after making a 6am check of things to make sure I wasn’t going to lose out on a big chase day.  But the near lunch reawakening gave me some pause.  For a couple days, the HRRR had good tracks across northeast Colorado, so I decided a backyarder was in order, left about 2p, and was on storms pretty much all day.  I will have a write-up coming on this day, but bottom line was the marginal risk exceeded my very low expectations.  I ended up in Goodland at the end and made the three hour drive home, getting back in shortly before 2am.  I slept away most of Sunday haha That’s the reason I choose the hotel most times cause I was basically useless on Sunday after that.

The week looks mostly quiet, but we’ll start to see an uptick in severe weather potential toward the latter part of the week, maybe as early as Friday.  Right now, SPC has highlighted SATURDAY, the same day as the Wakita 30th Twister Anniversary, in the same area as Wakita.  I have debated on attending the celebration, but should a legit chase opportunity exist, that will probably mean I am in the area by default, so we’ll see.  As the back half of the month rolls, we should see the pattern change back to something that supports a more active stretch, so I would imagine the downtime will be closing out here this week.  I have updated my chase outlook days accordingly.