Tropics aside, tomorrow looks to be an active severe weather day around the Central US as a very potent shortwave trough digs south from Canada on the backside of a long wave trough that is drifting east. Forecasting for tornadoes with late-season events like this is exponentially harder than Spring events (as evidenced by the wording in the SPC's Day 2 outlooks, ha!) but I do see some tornado potential tomorrow. What makes these events so difficult to forecast is the widespread areas of elevated thunderstorms that seem to blow up and fade away seemingly without rhyme or reason. Our inability to forecast this early and mid-day precipitation with much confidence makes forecasting surface features a very difficult task, and without that, tornado forecasting is nearly impossible. Like Dr. Doswell says, "Chasing boils down to going out on synoptic possibilities and succeeding or failing based on unresolved mesoscale events." Tomorrow definitely has a favorable synoptic (large-scale) setup, but we likely won't know until the afternoon what the mesoscale (intermediate-scale) environment will be like.
Annual March 1 post
2 weeks ago