At Tornado Titans, the more unique you are the more celebrated you are.

You can determine if this is about people or storm chase setups — because today is a very unique setup that you don’t see come around very often.

An upper level low is moving north, with 500mb flow out of the south.
The resultant shear is straight out of a tropical cyclone, with all of the flow near or east of due south. There are lots of non-supercell tornado analogs showing up in soundings, despite seemingly small 0-1km SRH. The thing I’m noticing are large 3CAPE values.
We should we storms begin to form 1-3 p.m. this afternoon. The greatest tornado risk today will be in the mid-late afternoon which is, again, unique.
There are even some updraft helicity tracks across Central Oklahoma.

What I expect

  • Simply put, today won’t behave like most normal severe weather setups on the Plains. The storms that could produce tornadoes will probably resemble rain showers more than the big-time supercells we are used to.
  • Storms probably won’t be prolific tornado producers, a lot of times you see these types of storms wind up and try to deliver a tornado and then they die.
  • The overall tornado risk is very low today. I think a couple of limiting factors to today’s unique setup is that moisture was slightly more scoured out than models had previously predicted with dewpoints only in the low-60s today.
  • The lack of robust and strong low-level wind shear will be a limiting factor.
  • Still, the proximity to the upper-low means there is a lot of added spin in the atmosphere, so it is feasible there will be tornado warnings and perhaps a red dot or two.

The Bottom Line

Tornadoes are possible today, along with some small hail in Oklahoma and Texas. There is also a tornadoes possible setup further north we didn’t touch on, but it somewhat resembles yesterday’s setup just further northeast.