re: Southern Severe Weather Threat (Thursday/Friday)

Meteorology is not an exact science. It takes a lot of ingredients coming together in the right way for severe weather to happen (particularly in order to have a big severe weather day). The event you’re talking about from a few weeks ago is an example of a couple of ingredients not reaching the level necessary to support widespread severe weather. Sometimes we don’t know until the day of whether the right ingredients exist, which is why there are times in which the forecast busts (like a few weeks ago). However, that doesn’t mean the National Weather Service and the broadcast meteorologists can wait until just a few hours in advance to start telling people that there is a threat. If they did, people would get just as mad as they do when a forecast busts.

You don't just ignore loaded gun soundings across a large warm sector with temps in the upper 70s and dews in the upper 60s. With a strong LLJ starting to crank at just the right time and a negatively tilted trough to fuel it all, turning a blind eye to the threat until the day of would be doing a disservice to the general public. Given this would be a largely nocturnal threat in the early season, you can't just ignore it and hope for the best.

That said, the open warm sector has pretty consistently remained strongly capped, model soundings are still comparable to the one posted in the OP. The main forcing remains with the front. It will likely take some mesoscale features, not yet known, to force pre-frontal storms. That could be remnant outflow from early morning storms, a kink in the mid-level flow, or just a few persistent cells that go up. Something will have to break that cap out ahead of the main front to reach the ceiling for this one.

To this point, CAMs haven't had much in the way of pre-frontal storms. The area with the greatest likelihood of those developing is in extreme eastern TX and the Arklatex region. Even if we start to see CAMs fire those storms, it still isn't a guarantee that a high end event is inevitable. The most likely failure mode then will be the cap. We could see those storms go up, struggle to organize, and then fizzle out. Lapse rates should be decent, moisture will be decent, and shear will pick up as the night goes on. So, the potential is there, with the main limiting factors being CIN and possibly timing.

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they were predicting bad stuff for my neighborhood. It started raining early in the morning, so the temp stayed down about 65 degrees all day and the temps were only going to drop into the low 40s overnight. I said, "there's nothing to worry about here, but they kept on putting out watches and warnings. Now at my friend's house about 25 miles south, it didn't rain much, and their temps got up in the 70s. Juust over the hill from his house a small tornado came through, it followed the creek bottom and knocked down a lot of trees and he was without power for about 4 days. We didn't even have lightning or wind gusts at our place. All my family was in a panic though and glued to the TV set. Now, if I ever start feeling those warm and cold pockets in the air, I will get worried. That's when I know there may be problems.

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25 miles isn’t that far away. The reason they put out “tornado probability” maps is to tell you the percent chance of a tornado within 25 mile radius. So whatever the risk was in your area it was likely justified.

It’s impossible to predict the exact weather for each neighborhood