Aaaaah, nuts! I HATE missing a storm chase–and on the first high risk day of the year, no less. Problem is, the setup is more iffy for the area I can get to down in southern Indiana.
My chase partner, Bill, has a business meeting in northern Indiana, and we had talked about connecting in Nappanee afterwards. The guy who is with him would have used my car to get back home, and Bill and I would have taken off from there and overnighted in Louisville, Kentucky. But the big action is forecast to be well off to the southwest, down in Arkansas and the Missouri boot heel. Nothing in the forecast models has made me think there”s much hope for Indiana, at least during the daylight hours. Sketchy possibilities at best, and I have business to attend to and an appointment this afternoon. So I told Bill I needed to decline.
But now comes the latest RUC 13 run, which moves 500 CAPE farther north through Illinois and Indiana, not all that terribly far south of Indianapolis. Plus, the WRF radar simulation for later today shows a line of storms extending all along through that area–and forecast storm motions suggest that any storms which form, while clipping along at a decent rate, will still be chaseable, not fifty-mile-an-hour space shuttles. Moreover, I bear in mind that so often, these big systems have tended to propagate farther to the northeast than the Storm Prediction Center anticipated. All this to say, I can picture myself sitting at my computer later in the day, watching as vigorous supercells light up the radar south of Indianapolis and wishing like crazy I had gone.
Sigh. Well, sometimes ya just have to make the hard calls. I have a copywriting business to attend to, and a website I”m trying to optimize. If Bill and I could get to the high risk area, then the choice would have been a no-brainer. Faced with a borderline scenario, though, and the likeliness that any real action for Indiana won”t ramp up till after dark, I need to attend to other priorities and content myself with chasing from the armchair later today.
I have a feeling, though, that I”m gonna be one frustrated camper around five o”clock.
