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Monday, April 25, 2026

A better-than-expected week of chasing: Plains forecast update 7, for April 25

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

This week's setups have turned out to be eminently Plains-trip worthy, and were it not for the copyright infringement issue, I'd have departed Wednesday evening and would already be out on the first trip of the season. Thursday's event was one or the ages, with two high-caliber tornado producing storms in northern Oklahoma.

Another pair of classic Plains supercell tornado days looks to be on tap for today (Saturday) and tomorrow (Sunday) before the ejecting wave brings the final events of the sequence to the Midwest on Monday and Tuesday:

NAM 500mb forecast for 7pm Monday evening

I'm currently working a short period of midnight shifts, and Sunday's event looks to have become too far west to safely make it in time from a 7am Sunday morning departure from St. Louis. That leaves Monday and Tuesday as the only events of this sequence I'll be able to chase.

While the model depictions of Monday's event check all of the boxes in the tornado department, even indicating outbreak potential: strong instability, good lapse rates and low level/deep layer shear - it is relatively common for these to be rather fragile and sensitive to any number of failure modes that crop up at the last minute (usually early-day storms and cloud cover are issues with such a strong jet core).

After Tuesday, medium-range models agree on the pattern shutting down as cold fronts scour the moisture down into the Gulf. Moisture is shown attempting a return around May 5, at which time we'll go back to watching things more closely.

Again, to maintain consistency with previous years' Plains trip probability tables, I'm plotting the chances for a trip as if I still had the resources to maintain my previous levels of operation. For this current system, the table will show 100%, as it would have been trip-worthy in a normal year (in fact a trip would already be in progress as we speak). Again, this is just to illustrate the impacts of copyright infringement on my storm chasing operation.

The following table plots the probabilities* of a Great Plains chase expedition taking place for the date ranges shown:

2026 Plains Chase Expeditions - Probabilities as of April 25*

April 25-26

100%

April 27-May 4

*Base/normal-season probability values are shown. Subtract 35 to 45 percentage points for effective copyright infringement imposed probability values.