April 22: West Texas!

We’ve got a chance for big, pretty storms in the Fort Stockton, Texas area today.

The level 2/5 risk extends from Mexico all the way to Kansas, but there’s better moisture (dew points) at the surface farther south, which is the reason for the choice of the Fort Stockton target. Take a look below. The HRRR models dew points to be fairly high for this area (the brighter blues) by this afternoon. Looking at upper 50 to low 60 degree dew points, which is plenty for storm development in this higher terrain. Keep in mind that the HRRR does not always accurately forecast moisture on all set-ups in higher terrain, so it is likely under-doing moisture expectations a bit.

If we use the future composite radar product, we can note that a singular storm develops around the I-10/I-20 fork, west of Pecos, Texas, around 3PM, then tracks between Pecos and Fort Stockton over the next several hours this evening. Keep in mind, again, that the HRRR may not be forecasting some things appropriately for this one, so the storm modeled below may be a cluster, or there may be more, but right now, it’s the best guidance we have.

The Plan

With a slow moving supercell potential like this, it would be best to pre-position 2-3 units out ahead of the storm to monitor from different angles. Once the storm fires, or is about to fire, we can deploy this temporary network out ahead, then drive west to meet the storm. It may look something like this (below).

Tomorrow, there’s also a chance for storms down here, so we’ll probably be doing this all over again!