re: Southern Severe Weather Threat (Thursday/Friday)

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.