The Northern Plains have all the ingredients to produce rapidly intensifying supercell thunderstorms. All hazards of severe weather will be possibilities including damaging wind gusts upwards of 70 mph or stronger, golfball-sized hail, and even a couple of tornadoes. Getting into the afternoon, storms may develop within portions of the Red River Valley and northwest/west-central Minnesota and track southeasterly. Any storm that develops Monday afternoon has the potential to be severe. As the evening progresses, storms will begin to form clusters, leading to more of a damaging wind threat. However, it is not certain that storms will even develop across most areas. How can that be so?
I call this a conditional threat. A threat that will likely occur if “this” happens, of which “this” just so happens to be a waiting game kinda thing… In this instance, I’m referencing a “cap” on the atmosphere. Think of the cap as a big lid that’s put down on a pressure cooker. The lid keeps all the steam and pressure locked in place and if the lid is strong enough nothing will happen, all the pressure will stay contained in the cooker. However if the cap or “lid on the pressure cooker” is weakened or not secured properly eventually all the steam and pressure blows off the top. This will be the situation most of us experience this afternoon. Will there be enough pressure to blow the cap off, or will the cap weaken so storms can break through it.
A cap is what will make or bust forecasts. Many times you’ve heard of a chance for bad storms and then they never happen. This is more times than not the reason why. This will be our conditional threat for today, Monday 6-24-24. If the cap can break and storms develop along the cold front, storms are likely to quickly become severe. If storms develop, they will happen from mid-afternoon through this evening. Below are examples of what the radar *may* look like depending on which scenario unfolds. Keep an eye on the weather this afternoon, and have a way to receive warning information.
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Meteorolgist,
Justin Storm
