I didn’t really have much time to look at data in the morning as I had to be at work at 9:00am CDT. Taking a quick glance at the Day 1 showed that central Illinois was in a slight risk of severe weather, as it had been the past few days. I figured that anything that fired up locally would be in the late afternoon or early evening hours. Temperatures were forecasted to be in the low 90s with dew points in the mid-upper 60s, definitely an unstable atmosphere.
Around 3:30pm while I was slaving away at work, the radio station I was listening to announced that a severe thunderstorm watch had been issued for Champaign County until 9:00pm CDT. (woo hoo!) I quickly got stuff settled at work and headed home to check the weather data. Radar showed a nice line of storms across west central Illinois that seemed to be bowing out. I also noticed a very distinct outflow boundary heading SSE towards my location. There were already storms firing up behind this boundary, so I figured it’d only be a matter of time before it fired up more.