Severe storms tear through the High Plains

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish and Tony Laubach break down the threat of severe storms across the central U.S. on June 21.

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00:00So, Tony's back here and that's good news. We're going to switch back over to the high-res radar data out of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

00:07And we can take us back out into western and southwest Nebraska here.

00:10We've got some strong storms on the map here and Tony is moving near Kimball in Nebraska.

00:15So, Tony, it looks like a pretty nasty storm out there off on the horizon.

00:21Yeah, we're going to make this quick, Jeff. The service is going to be pretty bad here.

00:24But we are actually tracking the storm. This is on the Colorado state line.

00:27You're looking at it right now. So, I'm southbound right now.

00:30This will be Highway 71 coming out of Kimball, tracking this storm.

00:34It's been kind of a long-track supercell that developed near Cheyenne and has been slowly working its way off to the east-southeast.

00:41We have been tracking this storm for the better part of a while, as Jeff showed.

00:47Paul, to get down to this point, but some big hail, maybe tornado, producing with this.

00:52All right, Tony. We appreciate that report there.

00:54And we are watching this here along with you as you're approaching the Colorado-Nebraska line,

00:59approaching northeastern Weld County, Colorado.

01:01We're looking across the state line into northeastern Weld County with this cell.

01:05And, again, still warned here until 5 p.m.

01:07We can take a look at some of the storm hazards associated with this.

01:10There is some large hail, so some of the curtains of rain that you were seeing there,

01:14embedded within that storm, there is a hail core with up to 3-inch diameter hail estimated by radar.

01:20So, again, Tony was in the area south of Kimball, kind of closing in on this cell.

01:25And we're looking at basically the intersection here between, we have Wyoming, southeast corner of that,

01:31southwest corner of the Nebraska Panhandle, and then we also have northeast Colorado, north-central Colorado here,

01:37and there's I-25, Cheyenne off to the west there, and Denver would be off to the southwest of this perspective.

01:43So that's the big storm in that part of the High Plains.

01:46Otherwise, we track that tornado threat that we're still seeing is currently warned.

01:50I'm going to head back there just momentarily to see if a new radar frame has come in,

01:55because it didn't look that impressive here over the past couple of minutes.

01:59The overall format of this, it looks like it might be kind of getting gobbled up by some new development on the east side of this.

02:07So this is probably going to morph into more of a straight-line wind event fairly soon.

02:11For a moment, though, it was an individual supercell with a nice little hook that was threatening.

02:16You can see there's a time it kind of fit through that little shape that I drew.

02:19But at this point, with additional convection to the south,

02:22there's a little bit too much competition for the structure of this storm to maintain itself here,

02:25and I think we're going to see the Weather Service basically cancel this tornado warning fairly soon.

02:30Set to run for 26 more minutes, but I'd be very surprised if it made it that far, if I'm reading the clock correctly there.

02:37So again, we are dealing with some strong storms a little farther south,

02:40and we have had a couple of tornado threats up in the northern parts of Iowa.

02:45Here is a new cell that is probably more of a threat, and I'm going to zoom out here.

02:51We want to grab the best available radar site, and it may still be that at least Sioux Falls, among our options here,

02:57will give us the best view of this looking from northwest to southeast, or northwest to east-southeast.

03:03And you can see that this is moving through an area near Ruthven, and they're green against red.

03:08Green is inbound movement toward the radar site, red is outbound.

03:11So we are admittedly looking high up into the atmosphere with this one,

03:14but it is at least a clear signal of rotational loft here.

03:20So for that reason, rotational loft can sometimes translate down to ground level.

03:25There is a relatively new tornado warning here in Topalo Alto County of Iowa, including the Emmitsburg area.

03:31The threat is still off to your west in Emmitsburg at the moment,

03:33but we have to keep an eye out for that as that will be a risk that we'll have to watch.

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