A massive swath of the U.S., from the southern Texas border to the Dakotas, faced severe storms on Oct. 3, and AccuWeather's Tony Laubach was live in the midst of it.
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00:00 The severe weather threat does continue from the south central U.S. all the way up into
00:02 the northern plains at this point.
00:05 And in the center of these storms, you know who it is.
00:08 Yes.
00:09 The meteorologist and storm chaser who's live in Grove City, Tony Laubach.
00:12 Tony, how are things going on where you're at?
00:17 Well, Masha, it has been a busy start to the day already here.
00:21 And you'll have to forgive if the service goes in and out a little bit.
00:23 We're kind of on I-70 in the remote part of Kansas between Oakley and Wakini, but we'll
00:27 do our best to keep you live here.
00:29 We've gotten out of the initial line of storms that formed earlier this afternoon, further
00:34 out to the west along the Kansas-Colorado border.
00:37 Those severe storms have produced hail and damaging winds.
00:39 We do have an active tornado warning with that.
00:41 Let's take you to Oakley, Kansas, where this just shot a little bit earlier here.
00:45 Some pretty intense storms rolled through here.
00:47 Most of the hail was pretty small by the time it got to Oakley.
00:51 This storm was responsible for up to golf ball-sized hail near the town of Winona.
00:55 It certainly looked impressive, especially if you were on I-70 heading toward this particular
01:00 storm.
01:01 But a lot of drivers taking shelter here at the truck stop.
01:03 This was at exit 70, the Oakley exit, the westernmost Oakley exit.
01:07 And you see a lot of the hail on the ground there.
01:10 Most of it was just under an inch in diameter.
01:12 So while the hail wasn't severe criteria, some of the wind gusts were.
01:16 We did measure a wind gust of 58 miles per hour.
01:18 So that is right at the bottom threshold for severe storms.
01:21 That storm started isolated as a supercell, but then kind of formed into a line.
01:27 And now the concern really is going to be damaging winds with that.
01:29 But as I mentioned, tornado warning up near the town of Oberlin.
01:32 That is in the northwest part of the state, approaching the Nebraska border.
01:36 That is a QLCS, embedded circulation within that line.
01:40 That is going to be the immediate concern in terms of tornadic activity as this line
01:44 of thunderstorms continues to lift very quickly off to the northeast.
01:48 What I am watching for is development a little bit ahead of that line, further east, down
01:53 toward the Dodge City area, where we may see another round of isolated severe storms.
01:57 And those might have a bigger hail and tornado threat, guys.
02:01 Well thank you for that, Tony.
02:02 Exactly.
02:03 You'll be watching for that in front of that line.
02:05 You know, I love when we get all sciencey about things.
02:07 Folks, Tony was talking about a QLCS, quasi-linear convective system.
02:12 Let me just show you what that is right here.
02:14 It's this line of showers and thunderstorms.
02:17 And like he was saying, within this, you get embedded tornadoes.
02:20 So we're going to continue to watch in front of this line as this storm continues to march
02:24 farther east.
02:25 Like he said, we have that tornado warning.
02:27 And as we head into the rest of the night, this large swath of area from Mexico all the
02:33 way almost to Canada is going to be seeing severe weather.
02:35 We're talking about large hail and isolated tornadoes, damaging wind gusts up to 80 miles
02:41 an hour with that AccuWeather local storm X.