I have been watching the forecast for about a week for severe storms today. The computer models were not in agreement even through the day on Thursday. The severe weather outlook had most of our area under an enhanced risk (level 3 out of 5) for severe storms today. When the data came in this morning, it looked like the dry line was going to shift farther east than what forecasters thought even on Thursday. Now with the latest update late this morning, it appears that will be the case. The dry line is forecast to move well into the Rolling Plains by 4:00-5:00 this afternoon. That will take it east of Floydada, Ralls and Lamesa and obviously well east of Lubbock. Areas behind the dry line will just see gusty wind today and sunshine. Areas to the east will be more muggy.
As you can see in the photo above, the severe weather threat for today keeps getting moved farther to the southeast. The Storm Prediction Center is now focusing the main threat for baseball size hail, 70-80 mph wind gusts and a few tornadoes along and south of Interstate 20 this evening. The orange areas are the target areas in the picture above. A few storms can not be ruled out early tomorrow morning in our area.
The pictures below show the dry line position by 8:00 tonight. The green areas are the more moist locations and the brown areas are dry. The storms will form south of I-20 and move to the northeast pretty quickly. So the brown areas will not see storms tonight, but as the dry line moves back west after midnight, some storms could come farther west. The other picture below is the high resolution forecast for 3:30 am tomorrow. It is forecasting thunderstorms in Scurry and Borden Counties at that time. That certainly can not be ruled out. But it looks as though most of the area will be missing out on the storms today and over night. That doesn't mean we're completely clear for Lubbock, but it is looking pretty darn close.
If anything should change, I will post another update.
