You gotta love early season severe weather chances. There is always some kind of parameter missing, or conditional to make widespread severe storms.  A low pressure area is expected to develop along the front range early on Saturday.  As this low moves into northwest Kansas, models suggest a dryline will surge east into central Kansas.  Lots of model timing issues are still to be worked out on where this dryline will be during the warmest hours of the day. But current thoughts suggest it will lay out somewhere between Wakeeney and Hays, to between Greensburg and Pratt – generally along US 183. The SPC Outlook has been expanded to a broad area of Kansas and adjacent states with a 15% probability of severe weather.

The “conditional” part of the forecast will be the amount of low-level moisture return east of this dryline. Will it arrive in time?  Models indicate low to mid 50s dewpoints ahead of the front, which would lead to an iffy amount of instability ahead of the dryline.  With the expected dynamics with this system, it looks like another typical early season setup with impressive shear values, a sharp dryline, but marginal instability values. The one thing that does look favorable for storms to develop, is the forecast soundings look uncapped during peak heating on Saturday, but given the marginal instability, storm development should be more isolated in nature.

Here’s my call: we could see a few supercells in NW KS but the further south you go, into south central KS, the more likely it becomes that we see a fairly brief chance of supercells structures, quickly evolving into a thin broken squall line.