I never did any forecasting for today until just a minute ago. I only looked at a few things, but I’m not real impressed with what I’m seeing as far as tornado potential. These kinds of setups are really tough to judge as far as tornadoes go, but more times than not they won’t pan out. The biggest problems I see is veering 850mb winds, which are causing virtually no turning in the 850-500mb layer over the western portion of the tornado risk area that SPC put. Over the eastern portion 850mb winds back slightly more, but they are weaker which takes away from the SRH. The other big problem is convective evolution. With storms firing all over the place it is likely to be a sloppy afternoon. Tornadic storms don’t usually thrive unless they are isolated. One cell after another developing over the warm sector doesn’t bode well for tornadoes. You end up getting a cluster fuck.
I think we will see a few dominant cells this afternoon in training lines/clusters that produce tornadoes, but this will not be a photogenic chaser friendly setup. I could very easily be wrong on this though. With extreme instability and respectable deep layer shear there certainly is the potential for some serious tornadoes. Veering 850mb winds can spike your SRH values too, but I still don’t think the low level shear is that great for tornadoes. I don’t like very many setups where 850 winds are veering badly and this is one of them.
I’m going to watch this unfold through the day and I’ll update if I have anything worth saying. If I was chasing I would probably set up about 50 miles south of Minneapolis and see how things evolve.