01.19.10
Wild Weather
As a follow-up to Sunday’s post, the rain continues to fall in California and now into Arizona. There were a few high wind reports in California today, including 75 mph wind gusts around San Francisco and a 93 mph wind gust near Los Angeles. Furthermore, there were three tornadoes reported around L.A. this afternoon! I’m not certain at this point how they formed. Instability and wind shear were not great in the area; in fact, the environment around San Francisco looked more favorable for tornadoes. I suspect there must have been just enough shear to spin up the brief tornadoes within the storm complex.
As for the potential of severe weather in the southern Plains, dewpoints are already in the lower 60s in eastern Texas and the Dallas/Fort Worth sounding showed a fairly unstable atmosphere this evening, and shear was pretty good, but there was a significant capping inversion. If clouds were not so thick over Oklahoma and Texas, temperatures would have been a little warmer today and there would have been a decent chance for some strong thunderstorms in southeast Oklahoma and east Texas.
Tomorrow’s severe weather setup could be interesting. Based on instability and lift along the cold front, I would think that the greatest chance for severe thunderstorms would be somewhere along I-30 from Dallas to Texarkana. Low-level shear in this area is not bad, but based on the forecast hodographs I would think that the main threat is hail. Shear is forecast to be much greater in Louisiana, but soundings appear to be saturated up to the tropopause. Provided that there are some organized thunderstorms around the mesoscale convective system, I would not be surprised to see a few rain-wrapped tornado reports around the Louisiana/Mississippi border.
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