TAE Mesoanalysis #1

Forcing and storms remain well to the west of our CWA, but the atmosphere is becoming primed for strong to severe storms later this afternoon. LAPS All Sky retrievals show that ML instability has been steadily building, reaching roughly 500 J/kg along the Gulf coast.An 8 hour loop shows how the instability has built and gives more confidence that instability will continue to build ahead of the storms to our west. We did feel that LAPS CAPE seemed a bit underdone given the intensity of the downstream of the convection, so we took a look at the latest NUCAPS retrievals. We examined the point in the extreme SE of our CWA.The boundary layer on the unadjusted sounding required some adjustment to match the nearest obs, but overall, seemed to capture the general profile well. I was initially skeptical about the warm nose just above 700mb, but a similar feature was evident on the 12z sounding from TAE. This feature may have an impact on storm intensity and potential hazards, and it would be particularly helpful to see how this feature changes over time. Sandor Clegane