Millions to be impacted by late-week severe weather

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Guy Pearson warns that hundreds of millions of people will be impacted by late-week severe storms from Friday heading into the weekend, with the risk of flooding, hail and tornadoes.

Transcript

00:00I want to bring in our severe weather expert Guy Pearson from our severe weather studio

00:05in Wichita, Kansas. And Guy, let's talk about what we have going in on Friday here.

00:12What we call the dynamics, the forcing is in a sense through the roof, but there is some concern

00:20that the tornado, that we may not get as many tornadoes as the pattern would dictate due to

00:26the fact that we don't have a lot of low level moisture with this storm coming north.

00:33That's exactly right. Sort of with the first system that's going to be moving across,

00:38you know, the southern part of the United States that Ari talked about there here on the day on

00:44Thursday is really going to disrupt that southerly gulf moisture that we would typically see quickly

00:49returning to the north, right? So sometimes we get that mixing of air doesn't allow that

00:54moisture transport back north. So that is the one limiting factor with this. We certainly have

00:58a lot of dynamics and a lot of wind energy like we've talked about with this system.

01:03It's coming out in a favorable negative tilt is what we typically call. And so with that,

01:09then it really allows those winds to really spread out and really allow the turning of the winds

01:15through the elevation to really be able to produce those tornadoes. But you do have to have enough

01:21moisture. I was looking at a couple pieces of data coming into this and there are some hints

01:27of sort of that minimum level of dew point temperatures that we're looking at in the area

01:32that we actually do have highlighted with the high risk here. All right, let's talk about Saturday.

01:38Now, these storms, as you've highlighted, these are going to be fast movers guy moving very quickly

01:43to the northeast and they're going to linger well past sunset. So that's even a very dangerous

01:50aspect of the storm. Saturday, severe weather threat looks, unfortunately, we have another

01:55high risk, but it's a little different. Yep. With this one, we have better moisture to the south.

02:04We do have more energy coming in from the west. And so it's a better combination of all ingredients

02:10needed for that tornadic development. And so with that, you know, we are looking across a good

02:16portion of the south here that is in that high risk for Saturday with flash flooding, hail, even

02:22large hail, tornadoes, and certainly a widespread damaging wind gusts of 65 to 75 miles

02:30an hour as we progress through the day on Saturday and certainly into Saturday night through these

02:36eastern areas. You know, you had mentioned the flooding. You know what, these thunderstorms a

02:41little bit more slow moving. It seems like the area that we're most concerned about is where we

02:46see that yellow from northern Mississippi and unfortunately in the parts of Kentucky.

02:54Yeah, certainly that the initial boundary that we have there where everything starts to redevelop,

02:59it's going to start and it's going to redevelop and move over the same areas initially before then

03:04starting to move on. So there will be some time in there where there'll be multiple rounds of heavy

03:09rain. All right, AccuWeather severe weather expert Guy Pearson joining us from our severe

03:14weather studio in Wichita, Kansas. Thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather Early. Stay with us.

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