'It's only going to get worse:' Tornadic storms leave the ground saturated with more rain on the way

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Aaron Rigsby reported live on April 4 after chasing tornado-warned supercells through Texas and Arkansas, setting the stage for dangerous flooding.

Transcript

00:00We have had a lot of great live coverage with our storm chasers and now we're going to take you out

00:04to Ash Flat, Arkansas with storm chaser Aaron Rigsby. Aaron what's going on out there?

00:12Yeah good evening guys. So right now you can probably tell behind me there's a little bit

00:15of a lowering. This is one of the severe storms coming up from pretty much southwest to northeast.

00:21I tell you it's a little bit ominous being here because back on March 14th some of this area was

00:25heavily damaged by those tornadoes that moved through here. There's been several tornado

00:29warnings earlier associated with this same complex of storms. Haven't been issued one

00:34recently just yet. That's not to say it can't spin up and potentially produce a

00:38tornado as it continues to move upstream and eventually into Missouri.

00:45And Aaron we're dealing with again a lot of moisture. Tremendously moist environment now

00:50with the low cloud bases. Some of these wall clouds have been creeping across the sky

00:56at a very low altitude almost like you can reach up and touch the sky.

01:00So how is this behaving compared to some of the environments that you chase much farther west?

01:07Yeah well it's actually been interesting because the further west that I get and the elevation

01:11starts to increase you are almost inside of the cloud base. So it makes visibility,

01:16which is already hard to begin with, with the vigorous terrain around here,

01:19the big trees, makes it extremely difficult to get a visual on the base of these storms. So

01:24this particular area of the country is very tricky to chase in. Comparatively out west,

01:29you throw on the flooded roadways on top of that and it's just a double whammy. So it makes things

01:33very complicated from a chasing perspective. Now earlier near Pleasant Plains there was a storm

01:40that rolled through there earlier and I was just far enough away where it was hard to tell if

01:43anything was on the ground. But it was rapidly rotating and it did produce a funnel cloud. I

01:48couldn't tell if it made ground contact or not. But that's been the case all across the state.

01:51All these little rain showers continue to spin as they move from southwest to northeast and

01:56eventually overnight these are going to train and cause major flash flooding issues into the

01:59overnight hours into tomorrow morning. All right Aaron give us an update on just we've been talking

02:04about the dangerous flash flooding ongoing. So give us an idea of just how saturated

02:09it is out there the ground is with how much rainfall we've seen so far.

02:15Yeah well I tell you guys earlier I put my drone up a little bit further to the east closer to the

02:20Mississippi Delta region in eastern Arkansas and nearly every single field within a visual radius

02:26of my drone was already flooded just from the rainfall over the last couple of days.

02:31Now the problem that this is creating it may not necessarily seem too bad right now but with the

02:36ground being so saturated it can't hold that moisture that's going to be coming and we haven't

02:40even seen the worst yet. These storms are already starting to stack up and strain upon one another

02:44and it's only going to get worse from today and into tomorrow. So that's going to set the stage

02:49for potentially catastrophic results from anywhere to northwest or excuse me northeast Arkansas into

02:56Missouri, southern Illinois, into Indiana. That's only going to be around one because that water has

03:00to go somewhere and it's going to be those rivers so there's going to be flood issues that have to

03:04be dealt with for days to come beyond this storm system. All right Aaron Rigsby reporting live right

03:09now in Ash Flat, Arkansas. Thank you so much for checking in we'll check in with you here coming up.

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