I have noticed over the past year or so that the CAPE's from
the hourly surface fields in the RUC are often too high.
It's not uncommon to see values of 10,000 or more. Comparing
the RUC analyzed CAPES against LAPS shows that the RUC
is often way to high. For example across the Upstate of South Carolina the 5/27/14Z RUC indicates CAPES near 4600, while LAPS is around 3000. Does anyone know why the values are abnormally high? The surface theta-e fields seem consistent with observation, so my guess is something in the model's boundary layer is causing this.

Thanks,

Mike Dross