AccuWeather's Tony Laubach was reporting live from Litchfield, Nebraska, when golf ball-sized hail began coming down hard on the evening of June 7.
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00:00With the following severe weather throughout the evening hours, our very own Tony Laubach has been out and about, going from Thedford all the way to Litchfield in Nebraska, nearly 100 miles along State Route 2.
00:12And he joins us now. Tony, I hear that you're experiencing some rather large hail right now.
00:21Well Justin, it's not terribly large. I'm going to get out here briefly because I want to show you.
00:25You see the gray kind of off to the side. That is the oncoming hail. You can kind of hear a few of them tinking there on the car.
00:31We're watching an area that's kind of embedded back in the rain a little bit here.
00:35This storm did pick up a tornado warning, and we are concerned about some very sharp rotation in here.
00:41Now the hail's getting big. Now the hail's getting big. All right, we're coming in.
00:44We're looking probably some one-inch hail right now. I'm going to go ahead and duck back into the car.
00:48It looked like it was kind of taking a breather here, but yeah, we've easily got one-inch hail.
00:52You actually can see it bouncing on the grass here. I can zoom in for you here, and you see some of that hail starting to bounce here.
00:58And you can hear it on the car. Yeah, we're probably approaching golf balls here, and you can actually kind of see it bouncing on the ground here.
01:03But I'm going to bring you back wide again. Oops, wrong way. We're going to bring it back wide here and clear the windshield for you.
01:08But yeah, this is a very dangerous storm. Again, we're probably looking at some golf ball-sized hail falling now on my location.
01:15And this is really going to start to come down here, and you can see the sign there.
01:18So we're just – we're southeast of Broken Bow by about 32 miles. You can see that hail just bouncing on the ground.
01:24So now you understand why I got in the car. We were hoping we were going to be able to do this a little bit better.
01:30I'm going to go ahead and roach you out the window here because I want to show you the storm with the hail, if I can, and show you kind of what we're looking at here.
01:38So that is the core. That's kind of one of the leading edge of the storm.
01:42You see the windmill here off to the side, and then, again, the hail bouncing on the foreground here.
01:46So we are verifying to you right now, inch to inch and a half, maybe approaching golf balls at times.
01:53Again, you can really see it bouncing there in the grass, so we know we've got some good hail here.
01:57So, Justin, we're going to go ahead and cut this a little bit on the short side here for you.
02:01We don't want to get in here too deep with the hail here.
02:04But yeah, very severe storm moving to the Litchfield area, hazard, and Grand Island, biggest population center.
02:10I certainly would be concerned if I were you in Grand Island.
02:13So we're going to go ahead and continue to retreat southeast on Highway 2 toward the ironically named Hazard, Nebraska.
02:20I bet you didn't know that was a Richard Marx song.
02:23That's the town he was singing about, Justin. We'll toss it back to you.
02:26All right, Tony, stay safe out there.
02:28Again, traveling down, again, State Highway 2 off to the south of the east is that to Supercell.
02:33Rotating thunderstorm continues to follow suit.
02:37You can see some of those hailstones bouncing on the ground there.
02:40Like Tony said, anywhere from quarter size to potentially up to golf ball-sized hail.
02:44And there is several severe thunderstorm watches now going throughout the late evening time frame all the way until 11 o'clock here out east toward Topeka.
02:53Eventually, we'll even see some severe weather coming into Kansas City later on tonight.
02:58So make sure you have the AccuWeather app downloaded.
03:01Again, with that, you can have that extra layer of protection as you head to bed tonight.
03:05These thunderstorms will continue deep into the overnight here, especially where you see the orange.
03:10That implies numerous severe thunderstorms with damaging winds, isolated tornadoes, and hail.
03:15There's an AccuWeather Local Storm Axe of 90 miles per hour.
03:19And when you do have that AccuWeather app handy, make sure you have the push notifications on and the volume up.
03:25The instant warning is issued, you will be notified.