Every time it clouds up in the spring anybody loosely affiliated with weather gets asked if this event is going go be another 4/27/11. And that gets egged on by jackasses on social media pumping out fear porn by the dump truck full. So I decided to address a few things.
4/27/11 was a generational level outbreak. The one before then was the super outbreak of 1974. This far out it's impossible to know with any certainty how strong this Tuesday will be. On 4/23/11 they didn't know what was getting ready to happen. So anybody making claims of a massive tornado outbreak Tuesday is straight up full of shit.
That said, here is what we know. The SPC placed most of MS under a day 5 enhanced risk. That has no bearing on how bad it will be and doesn't mean this will end up a high risk. It simply means there's enough model agreement to be reasonably certain we will have severe weather on Tuesday. Now, the models are showing some very favorable parameters for a significant severe weather event. Some of the values are concerning. However, some of the others are just now coming into the low end of the severe threshold. The question is whether those marginal parameters keep trending up or will the high level numbers start coming down. Another mitigating factor is there appears to be little, if any, cap in place during the morning. That can lead to early messy convection that hampers supercell development. Will that continue or will some semblance of an early morning cap be in place to impede early convection? These are just some of the questions that are impossible to answer now. That is why the SPC will not issue a moderate risk before day 3 and a high risk before day 2. If they aren't sure enough to make the call 4 days out then Bob's weather page doesn't have a clue when he's saying it'll be Armageddon this far out.
So, how do I think this plays out? Based on the trends I'm seeing right now it would not surprise me to see parts of MS end up in a moderate risk for Tuesday. My thinking is that area, if it happens, will be primarily west of I-55 and south of Highway 82. By tomorrow afternoon some of the midrange models will start coming into play and it'll be interesting to see what they say. But no need to panic. This is spring in MS. We get storm systems like this every year. Just be prepared. Sunday, a video I made on sheltering during severe weather will hit our YouTube page. It was the fifth and last video in the severe weather series I made. It's currently available now on our Patreon site, but due to the subject of the video, will be made public to everybody on Sunday. So give it a listen and make sure you're ready for severe weather when it affects your area.
