00:00All right, joining me right now is AccuWeather severe weather expert Guy Pearson.
00:04And Guy, before we start doing the breakdown here, we are now past the heart of the severe weather season.
00:13We're kind of on a downward trend, but I want to show you where we are so far this year with the tornado reports.
00:20And it's been quite a season. It seems like it's been nonstop, Guy, since March.
00:30Yeah, certainly, Bernie. We had that big jump in March.
00:34We had several days there of numerous tornadoes, and so it ramped up early.
00:40And then as we've gotten through April and May, we've had several days where we've had over 30 tornadoes in each day within sort of a week's time frame.
00:52And so it's really been able to maintain and keep us well above average for this time of year so far.
00:57All right, we kind of have a summer feel right now, Guy.
01:00Once we get into June, we start seeing less and less severe weather.
01:04But flash flooding is something that we see a little more of.
01:08And you were mentioning me this morning driving locally around Wichita.
01:12A lot of the gutters, a lot of the rain, there's a lot of water in low-lying areas.
01:17And this is the rainfall that we've seen over the last 24 hours.
01:20A lot of spots over an inch, two inches of rain.
01:23Yep, certainly.
01:27There's been one to two inches that's fallen over, you know, a good chunk of south-central Kansas here.
01:33And that's sort of that complex that's moving towards Kansas City this morning.
01:36And, yeah, I was a little surprised with the amount of rain that was flowing down some of the city streets and stuff like that.
01:41I know one of our meteorologists here has actually picked up over three inches since last night.
01:46So there's certainly some spotty areas of some heavier rain.
01:51And that's going to be one of the continuing trends with redevelopment later today.
01:55And then especially tonight across, you know, eastern Kansas, all the way really from Kansas City all the way back down to even Dallas and Fort Worth.
02:04We can see flooding rains with any of these storms later today and tonight.
02:07It's certainly steamy enough temperatures.
02:10There they are in the 80s all the way up into the Chicago area.
02:14And, you know, it kind of has an August feel to it.
02:17Not only the temperature, but sometimes you can get the temperatures this time of the year and the low-level moisture is low with more of a west wind.
02:24But now we have a flow coming right out of the Gulf of America.
02:28It's just steamy from Texas all the way towards Chicago later today.
02:32Yeah, certainly.
02:35That was one thing I noticed before we got into the storms yesterday here in Wichita was the amount of moisture outside and how humid it felt.
02:42So, yes, the Gulf is open back up.
02:44We've got quite a bit of moisture in 63 there from a dew point standpoint pushing all the way to Omaha.
02:50So, yes, certainly all of a sudden we sort of jumped into mid-June instead of early June here.
02:56You know, it's a pretty vigorous upper-level system.
02:58And, boy, on the northwest side it's just been a rain overnight in the Dallas, Denver area, I should say.
03:04Here's some pictures yesterday.
03:06This is Tony Laubach.
03:07What do you see here, Guy, when you see this video here?
03:14Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, if you're a meteorologist and you're into severe weather,
03:18that's one of the things that you really love to see the most is, you know, sort of storm structure,
03:22how things develop, how they start to stack up vertically.
03:26And if you can get everything to turn a little bit.
03:29And certainly sometimes, you know, with those upper-level lows,
03:32it's actually easier to get some tornadic development near those versus, well, say,
03:38along ahead a line of storms that may be associated with the cold front.
03:42So, you know, some of the pictures here are pretty nice.
03:45You get some lowering of the clouds.
03:46You know, with the images of the videos, tough to tell how much of it's actually turning, if any at all.
03:52But certainly you've got the lowering of the cloud base there and certainly something to be concerned with.
03:58All right.
03:58Let's take a look at the radar right now.
04:00You're talking about the rain area, another rain area coming into Kansas City.
04:04We have the area west of Dallas there right now.
04:09Let's do future radar here.
04:10There's that zone you were telling me you're concerned about from about Kansas City down toward Oklahoma City.
04:19That's a zone that you're worried not only for severe weather but flash flooding.
04:25Yeah, certainly.
04:26Severe weather, you know, hail, damaging winds, you know, 65 to 75 miles an hour is certainly going to be part of that.
04:34But in these slow-moving thunderstorms, you're going to get some flooding rains as well.
04:39You know, pick up a quick one, maybe two inches of rain in some of those thunderstorms.
04:44So certainly if you're traveling this evening, be on the lookout for those low spots and things like that.
04:50But as this line starts to progress east through the night, you are going to have some bowing segments in there.
04:55We will have some damaging winds, large hail probably more so earlier in the evening than anything.
05:01And then like you've been talking about this morning too, maybe a tornado or two but certainly does not look like anything from a widespread tornado outbreak or anything like that.
05:11And, you know, the main emphasis is really going to be from Kansas City back to eastern Kansas and into western Oklahoma, maybe far northern part of Texas there.
05:22But the sum risk expands quite, you know, quite a distance all the way from Wisconsin, all the way back through central Texas.
05:30With that boundary, we've got that upper level low off to the west.
05:33And so anytime you have that, you get those little pieces of energy to eject out.
05:38So just keep an eye out if you're across the central part of the United States today for severe weather and thunderstorms around your area.
05:45AccuWeather severe weather expert Guy Pearson.
05:47Guy, thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather Early.
