Welcome to the Chase Trip 2006 Blog! My chase vacation runs from May 24 through June 8. This year, I’ll be storm chasing with Jay Antle for our 9th year. Along with us will be Stacie Hanes, forecaster from the Fort Worth NWS office, from May 24-30. Jon Smith, my long-time friend from the grade school days, will also be with us — along with with Mitch Daszewski and Rob Mitchell. This will be the first time all of us have chased together in about 3 years. Jon, Rob, and Mitch will be out from May 27 to June 4, and will likely hook up with me, Jay, and Stacie out in the field somewhere.
It will continue to be a very quiet chase pattern through the next week….with some glimmer of hope that the pattern will become more favorable for chaseable storms around the time that Day 1 arrives. I always like to speculate/guess where our first day of the trip will be based on extended model trends. It’s within 10 days of Day 1 now, so I’ll keep a "dart-board" on hand here to keep track of how the GFS does for May 24th 
A large scale upper ridge will dominate the western CONUS up through probably the beginning of our trip. How strong the ridge is, where exactly the axis will be…etc, etc…is considered to be "white noise" at this point, but there seems to be a continued signal that the longwave pattern will be of northwest flow even through mid-next week…according to the deterministic GFS. Below are two 2-panel charts from today’s GFS 00z and 12z runs:
GFS 500mb:
GFS Surface:
both the 12z and 00z run support a northwest flow scenario with a decent surface high somewhere centered over the northern plains or midwest. A consensus between the two runs would suggest an upslope play probably in the OK-TX Panhandles region. This is a 10-day prog, so it’s bound to change, and it usually does. Below is the May 24 (Day 1) dart-board, which I will update daily based on the new GFS 00 and 12z runs Not exactly scientific, but we’ll see just how good (or bad) the GFS really is
