May 13th was the final day in a four day event stretching from Colorado to Iowa. I had actually driven home the prior night after a lengthy internal debate about whether I would even chase this day. Well, I awoke in the morning and given the forecast I decided that with the way this system performed the last three days, Northwest Iowa wasn’t that far after all.
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May 12th was the third day in a four day severe weather event. This day featured an enhanced risk across Northeast Nebraska and I decided to apply the lessons learned from the previous two days and play the north side of the surface low which was in the process of occluding as it drifted north.
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May 11th was day two of a four day chase event. The trough from yesterday was forecast to form a closed low in Southern Colorado and be nearly on top of the surface low. It would be another great opportunity for low topped supercells on the north and northeast side of the low. The bulk of turning in the hodographs would be in the lower 3km which is what we want to see for tornadoes.
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May 10th featured a rare 10% tornado risk in Northeast Colorado. When you have strong easterlies pumping moist air into the foothills you chase Colorado. While a trough was digging into the Four Corners, a lee cyclone was forecast to sit in Eastern Colorado with a warm front stretching into Northwest Kansas. This actually presented two decent targets for tornadoes as the Kansas play wasn’t something to discount.
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The development of a lee trough was expected in the central High Plains with high based storms expected to develop in the Wyoming/Colorado/Nebraska Panhandle area. These storms would move east into richer moisture while a shortwave trough was forecast to spread across Nebraska.
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