TORNADOES POSSIBLE

Hello and good morning.  Looks like a severe weather day for Saturday afternoon, evening in Oklahoma.  I can't say for sure if it's a high end severe weather day with long track significant tornadoes or maybe more of a messy severe weather day with marginal severe and few isolated tornadoes.  In reality, it probably falls somewhere in between those two scenarios.  But it really doesn't matter what I think.  All you need to know is that there is a significant risk for severe weather including tornadoes and flash flooding on Saturday and that you must pay attention to weather warnings.

The new Day 1 Risk is in from the Severe Storms Prediction Center and the risk has been upgraded to Moderate Risk for a large portion of our area.

In short I'm expecting showers and thunderstorms in the morning hours to move east and gradually weaken as we go into early this afternoon.  Then more thunderstorms will develop along and just ahead of a dry line in western Oklahoma and move quickly northeast into central Oklahoma early this evening and then into eastern Oklahoma tonight.  These are the thunderstorms we must watch closely for severe weather.  The strongest thunderstorms will be capable of producing very large hail, damaging winds and tornadoes.  Flash flooding is also a concern.

Here's one of our computer models showing a general time line.  Keep in mind this is not set in stone and is just a general forecast to give some indication on where and when.  It will not play out exactly like this so you must stay weather aware all day and listen and take action with any warnings that are issued.

This is future radar around 4pm Saturday.

This is future radar around 7-8pm Saturday.

This is future radar around 9-10pm Saturday.

This is a very strong negative tilt upper storm system coming right across Oklahoma Saturday evening.  Look at the upper level weather pattern predicted around 6pm this evening.

Here's the surface pattern for the same time around 6pm this evening.

Here's the dew point map around 6pm this evening showing the west edge of the low level moisture which is the dry line location.  Thunderstorms should fire up along the dry line by 4pm and head quickly northeast.

The thunderstorms will move very fast driven by powerful jet stream winds up and over 100 mph! Here's the jet stream forecast around 6pm Saturday evening.  The core of the strongest winds aloft moving over Oklahoma!

There are many things coming together for severe weather this afternoon / evening but one limiting factor could be rain cooled air from morning showers and thunderstorms.  It's possible that rain cooled air and cloud cover from morning rain could limit the overall instability and work against high end severe weather but we won't know the details until things actually begin to play out this afternoon.

This is why we must prepare for the worst and hope for the best.  This is such a strong storm system that there will probably be severe weather regardless of morning rain.  In fact, IMO it would be a miracle if Oklahoma didn't have severe weather today.  The question is not if we will have severe weather but how much severe weather and are we going to have high end severe weather. That all remains to be seen so lets just get prepared and pay attention to all weather warnings today.

Jon