Upcoming severe weather potential - Week of June 12th

Not much of an update on tomorrow's severe storm outlook; the SPC has maintained the marginal risk in just about the same area as it is. I'm feeling a little more potential than I was, as the NAM is suggesting stronger SBCAPE values than before, however the NAM has had a tendency to exaggerate instability lately, so it could easily be doing so again. Regardless, wind speeds aloft aren't going to be anything to ring bells about. One or two storms might just barely get above severe limits, but it's likely to be a similar set up to Sunday afternoon at best, with only a few warnings going out.

On the distant horizon, however, things are starting to look like they could be a different story.

I mentioned the other day that the long-range climate models were predicting some nastiness toward the end of June. Some of the runs were predicting some ugliness for the middle of June, too. Now that the GFS is just barely able to see that far, it's starting to show signs of trouble, too. This is, of course, very early, but these type of trouble indicators can foreshadow severe weather events like they did last year. The June 22nd event began to show up several weeks out, and was placed initially as far west as Minnesota. This is placing the nastier conditions in the Wisconsin/Illinois area for now, but that can easily change.

To give you a good idea of what kinds of problems could be associated with conditions like this, here's the forecast sounding for the dead center of that red bullseye:

Associated with similarly observed soundings were four storms which produced significant tornadoes. Significant tornado potential is rated at a whopping 7.5 out of 11. The only reason I'm imagining this sounding isn't generating the "potential hazard type" as "PDS TORNADO" rather than just plain "TORNADO" is that the critical angle is a bit tight at 73°. Still, if the winds get anywhere near as strong as what's being predicted there, you wouldn't need much instability to drive a major event. Based on wind direction and speed, this proposed scenario is reminding me a bit of what occurred on August 2nd of last year.

Again, we're way early here. This could manifest to our west and dive south, leaving us in the cold sector of a storm system rather than the warm, violent sector. Even if the system stayed on course, we could wind up with convective overturn as we have the past few times should it spawn storms to the west. Or, the system may not even manifest at all. I definitely believe it's worth talking about and keeping an eye on, though.