On Tuesday, April 3rd, things came together perfectly, in the morning/early afternoon, for supercells capable of producing strong tornadoes across the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.  The picture, left, is courtesy of Aaron Tuttle and depicts all of the ingredients that came together for this event.  The night prior, TVN determined that the wind shear was weaker than the prior day's "bust" and made the mistake of not analyzing things early in the AM!  What you can never predict, are mesoscale features, such as outflow boundaries, 18-24 hours out.

From the prior night's convection, an outflow boundary was situated along I-20 including the DFW area, with an unstable environment along and south of the area, with high CAPE values.  A gravity wave (induced from the prior night's convection) help bring cooler air aloft which helped erode the cap, by 12 p.m. A line of storms from the west of DFW, along a pacific front, were present, but two supercells emerged ahead of this line and rooted along this outflow boundary.  An outflow boundary, if supercells can latch on to them and do not contain a lot of cool air, can enhance wind shear along them, making conditions ripe for tornadoes--and that's what happened.

The two radar images show both supercells, one south of Fort Worth near Kennedale and the other south of Dallas, near Lancaster.  These were headed in a north/northeasterly direction straight for the DFW metroplex and the NWS had issued several tornado warnings early on to alert residents within the path.  They did an outstanding job as well as local TV stations showing helicopter footage as well as trained weather spotters and storm chasers reporting the tornados with exact locations and it resulted in NO loss of life--which was truly a miracle.  The most damaging tornado of the day was near Forney and Royse City, TX where a large cone tornado destroyed several buildings/houses and was rated an EF-3.  Again, no loss of life happened!  The Arlington, TX tornado was rated an EF-2 on the enhanced Fujita as well.