Yesterday was a generally quiet day for the summer experiment. The only major situation was in the ongoing MCS over the Central U.S. While much wasn't expected in the way of additional initiation, we kept this as an area of interest given the NearCasting outlook. A broad area of fairly significant instability was found in eastern TX and all of AR, ahead of the advancing squall line. This indicated a consistent strengthening of the line and it did end up developing into a fairly impressive bow echo that caused a broad area of traffic constraints and resulted in route congestion over Indianapolis Center.
Our other area of interest was north of this convection, up into western MI and Illinois, particularly the Chicago Center area. The NearCasting model was showing some instability here, and the synthetic satellite imagery indicated some scattered development along the cold front later in the afternoon. We did see some small cells develop shortly after 1900 UTC; however, given the extremely slow growth of these clouds, the Cloud Top Cooling (CTC) algorithm (designed to identify more robust development) was unable to detect the initiation. Additionally, cloud cover from the MCS further south moved in rather quickly, inhibiting the chance for clearing and CTC detections. The cells that did develop were very weak and short lived, and did not have any major impacts on Chicago Center.
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