Severe weather and tornado risk for the central US

AccuWeather

The Plains and Upper Midwest regions of the U.S. face the risk of severe thunderstorms and even tornadoes in the middle of this week with additional flood and hail potential.

Transcript

00:00Guy Pearson, who's here to break down the severe weather risk across the central U.S. in the days

00:04to come. And Guy, this is going to be one of those things where we talk about spring

00:09and the contrasting air, but we also have that challenge in fall too.

00:16Yeah, certainly. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Melissa. You know, typically,

00:21we do have that severe weather season early in the year where everything's trying to balance out from

00:27what is the cold to the warm air moving back north to more cold fronts moving through. Well,

00:33we're back in that season where things are changing once again as well. So we've got

00:39plenty of warmth, as you've highlighted there, basically everywhere across the plains up through

00:43the upper Midwest. We're all nice and warm. It's a matter of, okay, when's the next cold front

00:48coming? How much moisture do we have in place? And does it all come together to where we end

00:53up with severe weather? So, you know, going through things for tonight, it looks like as that

00:59first piece of energy starts to come out, we will see some thunderstorms develop. These will be

01:04probably quite a bit more widely scattered as far as what we're seeing tomorrow versus what we'll

01:10potentially see on Wednesday. We are looking for a severe thunderstorm risk with a few isolated

01:16severe weather and storms, you know, basically from western Oklahoma up through western Kansas,

01:23eastern Nebraska, and into western Iowa, mainly just some flooding downpour potentials as well

01:29as maybe some hail. And then there will be some wind. That is, you know, one thing we've talked

01:34about so far this morning is some of the lighting that we've seen out in the western part of the

01:38United States. Well, that really shows a really dynamic system. And so that dynamics has got to

01:44kick out here eventually and is going to help trigger those thunderstorms. And let's talk about

01:49the moisture in the atmosphere because that starts to change. We have had drought conditions across

01:54the plains for a while. So when we talk about the thunderstorms, they've been kind of few and far

01:58between, especially haven't quite seen the meso-convective complexes that we can get

02:03through summer. But boy, as we get into Wednesday, something starts to change.

02:09Yep, certainly. Even coming in to the office this morning here in Wichita, it still feels a little

02:13dry outside. It doesn't feel like a severe weather event or anything like that that we typically see.

02:19But the moisture content here, the graphic that you're showing, we certainly start out drier today,

02:24but then as things progress through tonight, we are certainly looking at more moisture pumping

02:29up from the Gulf of Mexico across Texas, Oklahoma, and into eastern Kansas, western Missouri,

02:35and southern Iowa, which becomes then the concern for Wednesday as we move forward here.

02:43And we do have a severe weather risk for Wednesday. Explain to us a little bit about

02:47these threats here. Yeah, so tomorrow, for Wednesday here, we do have a moderate risk

02:56out and that extends right from along the Red River of Oklahoma and Texas north through

03:02mainly east of basically what we call the I-35 corridor. So basically east of Oklahoma City,

03:09east of Wichita, and then up into the Kansas City area. So Tulsa, Springfield, southeast Kansas,

03:17and a good chunk of eastern Oklahoma will be under the gun tomorrow. As we have that moisture return,

03:24we've got our strong cold front in place, and then certainly the dynamics aloft that are going to

03:30help kick off severe thunderstorms. There will be isolated tornado risk, you know, across this

03:37part of the nation. We haven't really had too many tornado threats here lately, so that will

03:41certainly be one. Large hail will certainly be a possibility with some of those as well,

03:46and then damaging winds. We talked about the dynamics. We've got a lot of wind with this system,

03:51so those stronger storms and just, you know, some of the strong winds out ahead of a well

03:57will be able to to help fuel those storms to then produce some damaging winds, and that's 60 to 70

04:03with a local storm max and maybe even a couple of the storms reaching 80 miles an hour.

04:07And this time of year, the sun sets a little earlier, so the challenge will be for those that

04:12are trying to watch those tornadoes come in, if there's any occurring, they won't be able to do

04:17that at least through that evening hour just because of the change in the seasons here.

04:23AccuWeather severe weather expert Guy Pearson, thanks again for joining us on AccuWeather Early.

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