A new Tornado Watch has been issued to handle the lone supercell between Abilene and DFW. This watch, however, does NOT include the counties that make up the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Why?

When the SPC issues a new watch, they do so in coordination with the local offices that'll be affected by said watch. Therefore, the local offices can trim counties and clean things up based on what their opinion of the situation is. Over time, I've noticed a tendency for watches issued for North Central Texas to be drawn in a way that excludes Dallas and Tarrant counties - when I was a student intern at NWSFO Fort Worth, I saw the process firsthand many times.

In this situation, though, I find myself disagreeing with the decision to exclude the Metroplex. Currently, there is a persistent, cyclic, tornadic supercell located 70 miles away from the western edge of Tarrant County - the eastern extent of the new watch. At its current rate and direction of motion, the storm should cover that distance in 2-3 hours, arriving between 1:00 and 2:00 AM. The watch is valid until 4:00 AM.

Yeah, I don't get it, either. If there was sufficient reason to believe the storm won't survive long enough to reach Dallas-Fort Worth, I could understand the decision to hold off including Tarrant and Dallas counties in the watch. However, the storm continues to move into a favorable environment, with good dewpoints, high instabilities, and a weak cap. For much of its lifetime, the storm has maintained a max VIL of 70-80, and for the past two hours, it's been regularly producing tornadoes. In other words, the storm doesn't look to die any time soon.

Unfortunately, you can't just add a few counties to a watch at a time. You can cut counties out, but in order to add counties, a new watch will have to be issued. Perhaps that's the strategy: wait to see if there's any further development in the area, and then issue a new watch for NE Texas - including the Dallas-Fort Worth area - if necessary. The new watch does extend far enough to the west to handle storms entering from the southern Texas Panhandle, so perhaps that explains the 4:00 AM expiration.

Regardless, the whole thing is a bit odd. I would have included the Metroplex in the new watch just to give the area an extra heads-up - and besides, if you didn't want to give the news media and spotters a jolt given the late hour (which is sometimes a consideration) by including the Metroplex, what good will it be to just have to knock them out of bed a couple of hours from now when another new watch becomes necessary?

We strive for as much lead time as possible with warnings. Why not watches, too?