More severe weather on the way.

After what seemed like an endless winter for people in the Mid West and Chicago, it looks like another severe weather event will come together for these areas starting on Sunday.
Lets take a look at the setup here and one thing I like to look at for convection is called Theta-E. Simply put this is a combination of the surface temperature and dewpoint. The higher the temp and dewpoint the higher the Theta-E and it is a good place to look for possible convection. Heres Sundays Theta-E map.

Next we need to look for CAPE, and in this case surface based CAPE.

Those two parameters alone can give you an idea if storms are possible but if a strong cap is in place or nothing to get lift going then your likely not to have much, but in this case we will have a lifting trigger and thats the cold front. Taking a look at the Helicity  values there will be some of that/Along with EHI values over 1 and that means a higher potential for tornadoes.

Also for supercells I look at the Sfc-1km shear and shear in this area of 30-40knts or greater means a higher likelihood of supercells. This is for overnight Sunday.

and 6hr precip overnight.

And with all this in mind NC also looks to get in on some severe weather by day3

Thats all for now Ill hae more later.

Monday night/Tuesday morning was a rough BUT exciting one.

A record breaking severe weather event unfolded from late Sunday evening April 3 to early Tuesday morning April 5 2011 with over 1200 reports of severe weather and a lot of tornadoes, one that was in Surry county NC. Also strong straight line winds raced across the Triad area with a few tornado warnings out also.
Severe reports.

Heres a few radar screen shots of the storms as they crossed into the Triad metro area.

Heres a close up of the Supercell that prompt the tornado warning in Davidson and Guilford counties.

Special thanks to Matthew East for the Gibson Ridge level 3 data.
Heres what the upper air sounding from Greensboro looked like 30 to 45mins before the storms hit at around 2:45am.

Just a prime severe weather sounding. The 00z sounding looked nothing like that the 6z above is from warm air advection and moisture advection.

The blocking pattern is back, like what we saw much of Dec/Jan this past winter.

Here on the water vapor image we can see a blocking pattern in place with an Omega block over Canada and a -NAO over Greenland.

Here is the Thursday evening upper air observation at 500mb.

And with an upper ridge in Canada and an upper low in eastern Canada, we here on the eastern US can expect cooler and wetter conditions. Highs will be droping ESE out of Canada and surface lows across the southern/central US untill this pattern breaks down sometime possibly next week.