**Storm Prediction Center Risks for today are included at the bottom of the post**
Hello all! Long time, no talk. Things have been really busy at work for me and a lot of other stuff has been going on (which I will get in to in a later post as well as videos), but today’s focus will be a rather short post. We’ll just go over today’s severe weather threat.
Now, I have been keeping an eye on this system since Tuesday and the risk area was introduced on Wednesday before being upgraded to Enhanced yesterday. With each model run, it became more apparent. The one thing that was hard to predict is, as always, the destabilization factor. Right now, there is a lot of rain and some embedded thunderstorms in the areas where the storms are supposed to hit later. If enough destabilization doesn’t occur, there’s a chance we won’t see anything too bad.
So, the reason this post didn’t come earlier this morning is because I wanted to see what SPC would say on there 12:30 PM EDT update. I wanted to see if they saw what I saw. We are in agreement of still keeping an Enhanced Risk in place for parts of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin & Michigan (as seen below) due to the dynamics that will come in play later.
As I type, surface warming is already occurring in Wisconsin. The showers/storms in the area are elevated and not surfaced based…therefore they are not generating a cold pool (meaning that the atmosphere may not get entirely worked over). In this scenario, storms will fire in Southern Wisconsin & Northern Illinois, initially with a discrete supercell threat leading to downdrafts/microbursts as well as a chance for some hail and tornadoes. The storms will then congeal into a line before racing into Southwest Michigan later this evening, where they may reach maximum strength as a bow-echo with damaging winds (and perhaps a few tornadoes within the “kinks” in the line). As the storms reach the Lake Erie/Huron area, they may begin to weaken as they outrun the best dynamics and night fall also occurs.
This all will occur ahead of a shortwave trough that is presently over Iowa and Southern Minnesota. This trough, by tomorrow morning, will have already raced into Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. As it presses eastward into the areas indicated in the previous paragraph, surface temps will warm into the 80s with dew points in the upper 60s and lower 70s, causing enough instability. Even with modest advection, storms can still form with cloud cover even if full destabilization doesn’t occur (as long as there is a high enough temp and dew point). The storms will form along a weak surface wave immediately in front of the shortwave. They’ll also have MLCAPE near 1500 j/kg and a belt of 50 knot winds in the 500-750 mb layer to play with, meaning that damaging winds will definitely be probable within the storms. As stated earlier, hail and tornadoes are also possible, but the damaging wind threat, at the moment, is the heavy headline hitter.
Unfortunately, I cannot report much on what will occur or what is occuring right now due to several radar sites having difficulties. Using my GRLevel7 radar, many radar sites are showing slow returns or aren’t returning any data right now, this includes both the Grand Rapids & Chicago radars. My last return from the GRR radar shows a heavy shower approaching the Kalamazoo area as shown below.
However, as you can see here with the Quad Cities radar site, some storms are already beginning to fire in East and Northeast Iowa.
Another important thing to discuss is the rainfall potential. Many areas have already been hit with showers and it is possible that storms could end up training later today. Should that occur, it wouldn’t be surprising if some areas received locally heavy rainfall of 1 to 2 inches. So, outside of the severe weather threat, that is also something to keep an eye on.
As always, have a way to receive warnings. Make sure you check your local National Weather Service offices website (www.weather.gov) to check the latest. I will be updating on Twitter as well (per usual).
Until next time, “When clouds appear like towers, the Earth is refreshed by frequent showers”
Adventure Brett (or Forecaster Brett?)
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