Tuesday, May 18th morning discussion

So if you have not seen, SPC issued a Moderate Risk for severe weather over our area. This is especially exciting for me because we were only under 1 slight risk all of last chase! The outlook is 10% tornadoes 45% hail with hatching (chance of large hail within 25 miles of any area).

After waking up and getting some breakfast we met for our morning discussion. Morning visible satellite showed clouds beginning to clear out over the panhandle. Models show strong cape and decent shear across the region this afternoon. We had two decisions to make this afternoon. We could either leave and go north quickly into Colorado where a Denver cyclone will likely develop this afternoon. The conditions there are conditional, but if they get clearing there could be some supercells with tornadoes and some landspouts. Across our area the shear isn't quite as favorable, but we will likely see well structured discrete supercells which might go tornadic near dark. We are almost guaranteed to see storms with large hail.

This afternoon it looks like we will have CAPE between 2000 and 3000 J/kg (amount of buoyancy in the atmosphere) (1500 J/kg is sufficient) 0-3 SRH of 250 to 350 (200 is sufficient for supercells) and 0-1 EHI favorable for tornadoes by 0Z.
For anyone who can't understand this, it means conditions are right for storms with Large hail and an isolated tornado. We hope to see some well strutured supercells along the tx/nm border and follow them into Texas.

We will keep an eye on the models and decide exactly where to go later today. In the mean time we are going to leave our hotel at 11:00 am and launch a weather balloon in eastern New Mexico.

Quick peak to tomorrow: There will be a very concentrated regional outbreak which could favor large tornadoes. We will moniter the situation as the day progresses.