One of the upsides to starting my chase vacation 10 days into May is that I have the extra 10 days to sift through last second issues which may arise; such as my P1506 error from last night's engine light alert. I talked to my local Meineke and scheduled my appointment to go in with Dania on Monday to have it looked at. At that time, I will also get the tune-up, oil change, and other goodies done, as well as service and eliminate that light.
Another advantage to a late start is that I don't waste "vacation" time in early May, which is looking rather bleak at least through the first few days. Hell, I awakened this morning to 3 inches of snow on my car and snow still falling. Most of it is tapering out now, but another small round is expected tomorrow evening. Snow advisories up across various Colorado counties and freeze advisories up through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Not condusive to storm chasing. My mid-May start will hopefully prove to be a hidden blessing as it hopefully allows for the pattern to warm up and moisten up a bit. GFS runs out as far as the first few days of May do not hold a lot of weight in terms of accuracy, so its hard to be disappointed or pleased with what you see 200 plus hours out. Things can change either direction from one run to the next and typically like to do so. In any case, I am not holding out a ton of excitement for chasable weather for the first few days, which means, I get tempted less AND miss less. As far as I'm concerned, things can hold off til the 10th. Give me enough time to wrap up finals and get the car finalized; right now, I'm in no hurry... this time next week, my tune may change.
If I were sitting in Arkansas right now, I'd be a little concerned. Early morning convection has lead to a grunge fest over most of the target area. This is seriously doing a number on instability and is probably worrying a few chasers who made the long trek to chase what
still could be the first major outbreak of the season. I, personally, never was terribly excited about today, and not so much for the forecast aspect of it (which looked good prior to today), but because it's well out of my range for chasing right now. Had this been in May when I was already out, I'd be sitting right along side
Amos and company in Arkansas, but this far exceeds my 24 hour notice drive-time bubble, which barely would get me into Southern Missouri; and obviously falling right smack-dab in the middle of my busiest three days at work, really prevented me from diving too deep into this system.
I still say the potential is there, and obviously would not discount anything right now as it's only noon out East and 11a Central. We've chased beautiful supercells that produced on worse looking days (
March 27, 2004) where we drove over 100 miles to get into a small area of clearing and scored very well. I can see, and highly hope, this type of thing happening again where some clearing breaks out in a good area for supercell development and WHAM! You're staring down a tornado. I think the issues of convection quickly going linear have faded back a bit as the system has slowed from the models and will hopefully give a better time frame for discrete storms before going linear later in the evening. Hopefully this gives chasers an hour or two to play before things start to merge.
Looking at the latest visible satellite image and animation, Arkansas is socked in pretty good. A hole trying to develop in the clouds over extreme Northwest Arkansas, near Fayetteville, may be a sign of things to come, but it appears as if is well behind the frontal boundry. Definately not a large space to work with and definately on the wrong side of the front, but hopefully those clouds can start to burn away down south and give way to some sunlight; otherwise anything south of a Fort Smith to Searcy to Memphis line is pretty well caked in and looks like it will be for a bit longer. SPC does have an MD out for the area south of that above mentioned line, but they seem to concern themselves with severe potential rather than tornadoes. The two storms in the area are riding right along that line I mentioned at a pretty decent clip. However, they are kicking out some outflow boundries to the south of Little Rock at this time, so if some clearing can work its way in there, it may be worth sticking close to one of those boundries where the low level shear oughta be greatly enhanced.
This is a tough call, and since I haven't looked to deeply at the forecasts previous to now, its hard to judge things. I'm walking blindly into a complicated setup, so I'm really not going to reach out for answers with this one. I still think potential is there, but I certainly would not be very excited being blanketed in like that, either. SPC's latest Day 1 has a hatched 15% area much further south and east than previously though, extending from Southeast Arkansas eastward into Northern Mississippi, Northwestern Alabama, and extreme Southwestern Tennessee. Their text still has very strong wording and doesn't really harp too much on the cloud cover over the area right now. It'll be interesting to see how all this pans out over the next few hours. They're still thinking supercells with tornadoes are likely and who am I to argue... I don't think I'm quite as excited about the prospects, but hopefully I am proved wrong.
