9 days out

I've been monitoring the GFS for the last few days, and the swings in the solutions it comes out with every successive run are amazing. All that tells me is that the models cannot be trusted with anything this far in advance. A fact that I already knew, anyhow.

But just for fun, why not?

Here's a rundown of what the 10/00Z run of the GFS is saying we will be looking at for day 1 of our chase, May 19.

Moisture: we should be good, with an open Gulf and southeast winds all the way down south. A low is progged in northwest Kansas with an obvious dryline to its east. The dewpoint gradient isn't likely to be as slack as shown here--the GFS is notorious for a) not being moist enough, and b) smearing out gradients over too far an area. One caveat, though: that area has been under a terrible drought, and unless it rains there, a lot, between now and then, the dryline could end up being farther east.



850 moisture looks good, all advected on the nose of a 50 knot low-level jet.



CAPE looks okay, albeit not great. Again, this could be real or it could be something to do with the GFS being notoriously dry. We'll see, when the time gets closer. But still, in excess of 1500 J/kg is nothing to sniff at.



Lift should be easy to come by. A short-wave trough is forecast to move through the area, with 50 knots at 500 mb and cooling aloft.



Wind shear will, of course, be fine. With the aforementioned upper trough as well as the low-level jet, we should be in business.



So we'll see how this evolves over the next couple of days. I'm sure the model will paint a different scenario tomorrow, the next day and the next. What matters to me is what scenario is painted by Mother Nature.