I can be as sarcastic as anyone, but if you're going to be snarky/sarcastic, at least be smart. A lot of stupid crap being tossed out tonight. Since I'm not really in the mood to be all that sarcastic about this, I'm gonna use this thread to try to summarize where I sit rn.

Sunday's system is an extraordinary synoptic pattern for SE severe wx. These types of systems really don't come around every year. They probably don't quite come around every 3-5 years even. There's a lot that can be said about that, and the analog lists do a good job of that.

There are also clearly going to be mesoscale complications, particularly in the evolution of the convection and favored modes and regions for CI beyond the early morning WAA convection along and N of the warm front.

If you've taken a meso class, you know that the typical time scale for a meso-beta feature is roughly 24 hr. Individual convective cells (ordinary form) have a convective timescale of roughly 17 min, which increases the more organized the system is (usually proportional to...

...the environmental CAPE/shear space). My point is that these meso-gamma to meso-beta features have inherently low predictability once you get out a certain length of time ahead of them. We are just now really beginning to enter the time frame where we can begin to...

...predict the evolution of some of the meso-beta scale features. Some of these mesoscale modulators could augment the outcome of this event, and some could certainly dampen it. I don't know which will occur, and guess what? You don't either.

With all that said, the 00Z CAMs clearly break into 2 camps: the NSSL and ARW WRFs vs. the 3-km NAM and the NMMb core WRF. From my experience, the NSSL/ARW camp being the more robust solution is not great news, and certainly gets my attention.

One thing to monitor as more CAMs come in is how convectively unstable they make the warm sector (i.e. how much CAPE they paint). Again, in my experience, there have been certain events where the CAMs have shown some really hellacious solutions that haven't played out...

...and to a tee, overly robust CAPE often seems to play a significant role in that. From my perusal, it does not appear that the CAPE values being painted in the NSSL/ARW WRFs are overly robust, nor are they all that much different from the NMMb/3-km NAM solutions.

What we're seeing in the early CAM guidance is highly unlikely to be what we see play out Sunday, no matter which of these two main "camps" you're looking at. The key focus needs to still be on four primary points:

(1) This is a dangerous synoptic setup. (2) The ceiling for this is very high. (3) There are definite mesoscale questions that could lead to a much more tempered event. (4) This is hitting everyone at a time when they're probably even less inclined than usual to deal w/it.