Storm Chaser Coaching

Turns out people really do love the NAM despite its flaws. We @recast have decided to continue to offer our WOOF-NAM 12km for free indefinitely (link below). It’s also important to understand that we are cold starting from GFS Analysis which naturally does slightly change model outcomes compared to starting from a native NAM analysis. Because of that, we will be running quite a few hindcasts of both popular and requested dates and model inits so people can compare. If anyone has any examples they’d like to see, I’ll run them and put it on the site. woof-nam.recastsystems.com/i…

I've had some time to go over the data from our recent severe weather event in the Southern Plains on Monday (Nov. 2), and a few factors stand out to me as potential bugaboos that led to the underperformance (keep in mind that this is likely not an exhaustive list): *EARLY CONVECTIVE INITIATION: Storms fired just before 19z (1 pm CST), a couple hours earlier than expected, along the dryline across far western Oklahoma into the eastern Texas Panhandle. At this time, the dryline was still quite slanted from northeast to southwest. As a result, deep-layer shear vectors were much more parallel to the dryline, aiding in rapid upscale growth. Had storms formed a couple hours later as initially forecast, the portion of the dryline across western Oklahoma would've been oriented a bit more north-south as the secondary surface low tightened in southwest Kansas, perhaps warranting a less linear storm mode. *VEER-BACK: There seemed to be a notable absence of mesocyclones, both with more cellular elements within the convective line and with open-warm-sector convection, and those that did develop were relatively short-lived. This may be a result of the significant veer-back signature exhibited by proximity hodographs. Satrio et al. (2026) found that supercells tended to be weaker and less organized when the backing/kink in the hodograph begins within or just above the effective inflow layer, as opposed to when the backing is much higher in the profile or doesn't exist. Our 21z observed hodograph from Norman, OK, shows a significant kink beginning just a hair above the upper bound of the effective inflow layer. I suspect this played a role in stifling mesocyclone development and maintenance. *UNFAVORABLE LOW-LEVEL SHEAR VECTOR ORIENTATION: Line-embedded mesovortex tornadoes within a QLCS tend to be much more likely when low-level (generally 0-3km, per Gibbs (2021)) shear vectors are more perpendicular to the orientation of the QLCS itself. In this case, the line was oriented generally north-northeast to south-southwest, which was quite parallel to the low-level shear vectors, decreasing the chances for QLCS tornadoes despite strong low-level shear. *MEAGER THERMODYNAMICS: While this was not the most prominent factor, thermodynamic profiles left a bit to be desired, with meager midlevel lapse rates and relatively skinny CAPE. Also, the initial dryline storms that quickly evolved into a line tracked into an area where horizontal convective rolls, indicative of low-level stability, failed to dissipate much through the afternoon. Central Oklahoma also saw ample elevated convection and stagnant cloud cover for much of the day, which likely kept thermodynamics at bay.