Not a whole lot of action to report for Day 3. We started in the Pueblo, CO CWA, where we had a low CAPE, high shear environment. We were pleased with the CI algorithm in this area today. It successfully highlighted convective development to the south of our CWA. We also were pleased with the addition of the 16Z IASI satellite derived NUCAPS soundings. Cloud cover prevented us from getting much utility from the GOES LAP CAPE or LI data, and the product in our area was mostly filled in from the GFS model. The NUCAPS data for a point near Pueblo gave us a reasonable estimate of the instability for the region.
The lack of instability proved to be a killer, as we just couldn't get any thunderstorms going. It ended up being more of a steady rain event for the CWA.
We switched mid-afternoon to the Springfield, MO CWA, which didn't end up a whole lot more active. GOES LAP CAPE showed that we had some decent instability over the region.
However, shear was not very impressive. We got a few cells going over south-central MO, but they were more pulse cells and fell apart fairly quickly. We had a couple of cells that developed right along the CWA boundary with the St. Louis office. The ProbSevere algorithm picked up on these and increased quickly once the cells moved into the St. Louis area. One cell produced half dollar size hail just east of our CWA boundary, with a ProbSevere value of 90-95%. All-in-all, not a great convective day for us, though. -JP
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