What will it be: trough or ridge? Dry or moist?

This Sunday I leave for the plains with the Severe Weather class from UNC-Asheville. My friend from grad school, Dr. Godfrey, has asked me to help navigate (& drive) during the trip, and I'm excited to join them on this adventure. Now if only the atmosphere will cooperate: the long-range global NWP models (GFS, ECMWF, and NOGAPS) are all depicting some form of western ridge-eastern trough setup for the first few days of our trip. The most troubling thing is that some models take the eastern trough into a closed low parked over the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring dry stable northerly surface flow over the Gulf through the weekend. We'll see how it the atmosphere actually behaves (144-hr to 180-hr forecasts aren't entirely reliable), but regardless the first few days of the two-week class do not look promising. On "down" days, the class will visit SPC, NSSL, the research Doppler radars, and a mesonet site, and will hear talks from Dr. Chuck Doswell and other scientists & researchers. Of the 12 chaseable days (the first and last day are "ferry" days), climatology dictates that we should have 3-4 with storms, and at least 1 of those days should be chase-friendly with tornadoes. Again, all I can say is "we'll see". Of course from the objectives of the course, any atmospheric day is ripe for teaching: explaining the why of the atmosphere is just as important on non-storm days as on storm days. (It's just not as exciting to verify your forecast on the non-storm days!)