After look­ing at the most recent runs of the mod­els that update hourly, I’m think­ing Matt & I will be stomp­ing much of the same ground tonight that Kevin, Roxan and I did last night.

This model image (HRRR 14z) is show­ing a peak in the hail para­me­ters in north­ern Morris/Southern Geary coun­ties about 7pm. I like, too, that there looks to be some other peaks along the line (in the hopes it will draw some chasers out of the area I’m tar­get­ing <g>).

That fore­cast graphic is con­sis­tent with oth­ers based on the RUC model. It dif­fers a bit from the WRF model, but not so much I have any dif­fi­culty in mak­ing this my target.

Will Wichita get hail tonight? I think so. I am less sure it will meet severe cri­te­ria. I don’t feel it will hap­pen before dark…earlier I’d felt it might hap­pen dur­ing after­noon rush, but I hadn’t looked at things in any detail.

At this point, I’m look­ing to a close-in chase if we do one today. I’m just not pre­pared to make a run to Kansas City, Nebraska or Iowa on a low chance of tor­na­does. Espe­cially when dam­ag­ing hail is a good pos­si­bil­ity in my back yard. The down­side to what I’m see­ing is tim­ing. The indices for severe weather start to ramp up in the 4pm time frame…right now that’s the outer edge of the mod­els I use on the day of the storm. SO… it’s back to bed for some rest, and a more care­ful eval­u­a­tion mid-morning to early after­noon. With it being a close chase, I don’t have to make a firm deci­sion until mid-afternoon. That said, I’m lik­ing the area between US 50 and US 400 within an hour of Wichita, as a tar­get area.

Looks like today will be the first area chase day of the year. Pat and I chased south­west Okla­homa last week, but only because we were on the way to south cen­tral Texas anyway.

Today’s Gen­eral Chase Area

The blue cir­cle indi­cates the area I think Roxan, Kevin and I be in between 4pm and maybe 8pm or so today. There is a pretty good chaser con­ver­gence aimed for Salina, and I can see from the mod­els why peo­ple like that area, at least as things get going. But due to com­mit­ments here in town, I won’t be able to get an early enough start to make that a good start point, and I tend to shy away from chaser con­ver­gence when I can. The plan is to head north on K-15 out of New­ton and work along US-56, K-15, US-77 or K-177 as things develop. With storm motions being pretty slow, there ought to be an oppor­tu­nity for some good video and enough time to shade things toward the south edge, which is where I like to be most of the time.