CoD trip, day 2

Well, actually I'll start with a quick recap of day 1.

We drove through St. Louis and stopped at Pappy's, where I had some of the best ribs I've ever had--tender, juicy, smoky, mmmmm!

Farther west, across central Missouri, storms were firing up and happened to be on the way to crossing our path. So we went for one of them. It produced hail to the size of loonies, so we made that report to the NWS. We went west to keep on our repositioning.

It was actually a nice little bonus for a day on which we had expected not much--we got a little more. There was a shelf cloud with which we could do a little teaching, but otherwise it was pretty meh.

We stopped for dinner at a steakhouse in Kansas City, some of us listened to the Canucks go up 3-2 in the Stanley Cup finals, and we stayed the night in Junction City, KS.

Today is a bit of a dilemma, but I think we can avoid the problem by heading toward kind of the middle of the dilemma areas and decide on one on the road. The locations seem to be either southeast Colorado or far western Oklahoma--they're not too far apart from each other, so that's a little bit of a good thing.

The moisture is better in Oklahoma but it will be hotter; the moisture will be okay in Colorado but the temperature will be lower. So cloud bases should be at more or less equal relative heights. Instability is not a problem, with MLCAPEs near 2000 J/kg. Lift is interesting, as there might end up being a dryline/warm front intersection in Oklahoma, whereas the Colorado lift would be due to upslope flow. And wind shear--maybe that's the kicker. So to speak. We're looking at water vapour loops and upper charts, and as of this writing a couple of soundings, crucial (to us) ones, are missing. Great.

So we'll see. Follow us along on one of the links.