july 8's forecasts

a new model run, a new forecast.

july 14: north battleford. still looks like a pretty good setup, but if it shifts much farther to the west, we won't make it in time.
july 15: grand forks, nd. looks better than the previous run.
july 16: maybe northwest sd. maybe. or the battlefords.
july 17: estevan. not a bad setup.
july 18: watertown, sd.
july 19: north-central nebraska. i'm not kidding.
july 20: sioux land. maybe.

already a couple of the days have changed radically. it just goes to show how fickle the forecast models can be.

hurricane dennis is a category 4 as i write this. it's setting up to smack cuba. i hope everyone there is safe.

on a completely different note, things popped pretty huge this evening in far southeastern sk and southwestern mb. (there's currently a pretty good thunderstorm going on here in the city.) there were a couple of tornadoes (and we got pictures of them--sorry, not allowed to share these, by request of the photographers) along the mb/sk border and baseball hail. this morning it looked okay, shearwise, for supercells. well, maybe not even okay. marginal. but i guess we didn't count on the capes getting up so high. late this afternoon melita was reporting a ridiculously humid t/td of 29/26 and the associated cape was in the neighbourhood of 7000 j/kg. yes, seven thousand.

we think that the dew cell in melita might be a bit goofy, as it seems to read the dewpoints a little higher than the surrounding regions. but still, with a dewpoint around 23, the capes were still in the 5000 j/kg range. it seems that, especially in july, extreme capes like that need a little less shear to spin up tornadoes. they don't usually end up putting down long-lived ones--that's for the highly-sheared environment--but still, they can tube from time to time.

whenever i'm chasing i play the cape/shear game and, time and time again, i get burned by being attracted by the high capes, when modest capes and better shear usually end up producing the better storms. time and time again, i say.

i just hope i no longer get suckered like that.