Here's to hoping the clouds clear..
1km visible satellite showing a thick cloud deck stretching from the foothills and Palmer Divide all the way into Nebraska and Kansas. You can basically overlay the SPC MOD risk on top of these clouds. If they don't go, neither will our storms. I think they'll be cleared in the next few hours; which at the worst may delay initiation for a couple hours. That's fine by me; gives us more time to position and grab some lunch! Althought that Wendy's in Sterling is a biotch to find!
Glancing at the ETA looking at 0z Thursday (12 hours), it does show a healthy amount of helicity over our target area; closing in on 400 in the 3k and over 100 in the 1k. Cape values are over 1000 and pushing 2500 further north and east. The 500mb winds get stronger throughout the day, maxing out at about 40kts over Northeast Colorado right about 0z tonight. A SFC low is forecasted to be over southeastern Weld county about 0z, which when sat beneath the CAPE and SRH values, would keep my target area near Sterling; moving north and east from there as storms fire. Temperatures are a factor today which goes right back to cloud cover and fog. Clear those out, get some heating and hopefully bump those temps up a bit. The ETA is running dewpoints in the upper 40s (NE Colorado) to mid 50s (SW Nebraska). I'm not thinking anywhere in the target area will see temps at 70 or higher as we are on the cool side of the front and most of the warm temps are being held way to the south. Mid 60s at best for temps today with TDs in the low 50s.
My plan of attack; leave campus at 11:30am and make trails to Sterling. From there, we can reanalyze data, check our barings, and make adjustments if we need to. With the clouds hanging around this morning, it'll take a couple hours this morning for the clouds to clear, which oughta keep initiation at bay for a couple extra hours. That gives us at least an hour or two to hang in Sterling and if convection fires around us, make our way to a target storm and go from there. Verne Carlson will be armed with Baron WXworx, so we'll have live field coverage there. May also put a nowcaster to work for us this afternoon as well. Going to be a fun afternoon!
