The Plains and Upper Midwest regions of the U.S. face the risk of severe thunderstorms and even tornadoes in the middle of this week with additional flood and hail potential.
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00:00Guy Pearson, who's here to break down the severe weather risk across the central U.S. in the days
00:04to come. And Guy, this is going to be one of those things where we talk about spring
00:09and the contrasting air, but we also have that challenge in fall too.
00:16Yeah, certainly. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Melissa. You know, typically,
00:21we do have that severe weather season early in the year where everything's trying to balance out from
00:27what is the cold to the warm air moving back north to more cold fronts moving through. Well,
00:33we're back in that season where things are changing once again as well. So we've got
00:39plenty of warmth, as you've highlighted there, basically everywhere across the plains up through
00:43the upper Midwest. We're all nice and warm. It's a matter of, okay, when's the next cold front
00:48coming? How much moisture do we have in place? And does it all come together to where we end
00:53up with severe weather? So, you know, going through things for tonight, it looks like as that
00:59first piece of energy starts to come out, we will see some thunderstorms develop. These will be
01:04probably quite a bit more widely scattered as far as what we're seeing tomorrow versus what we'll
01:10potentially see on Wednesday. We are looking for a severe thunderstorm risk with a few isolated
01:16severe weather and storms, you know, basically from western Oklahoma up through western Kansas,
01:23eastern Nebraska, and into western Iowa, mainly just some flooding downpour potentials as well
01:29as maybe some hail. And then there will be some wind. That is, you know, one thing we've talked
01:34about so far this morning is some of the lighting that we've seen out in the western part of the
01:38United States. Well, that really shows a really dynamic system. And so that dynamics has got to
01:44kick out here eventually and is going to help trigger those thunderstorms. And let's talk about
01:49the moisture in the atmosphere because that starts to change. We have had drought conditions across
01:54the plains for a while. So when we talk about the thunderstorms, they've been kind of few and far
01:58between, especially haven't quite seen the meso-convective complexes that we can get
02:03through summer. But boy, as we get into Wednesday, something starts to change.
02:09Yep, certainly. Even coming in to the office this morning here in Wichita, it still feels a little
02:13dry outside. It doesn't feel like a severe weather event or anything like that that we typically see.
02:19But the moisture content here, the graphic that you're showing, we certainly start out drier today,
02:24but then as things progress through tonight, we are certainly looking at more moisture pumping
02:29up from the Gulf of Mexico across Texas, Oklahoma, and into eastern Kansas, western Missouri,
02:35and southern Iowa, which becomes then the concern for Wednesday as we move forward here.
02:43And we do have a severe weather risk for Wednesday. Explain to us a little bit about
02:47these threats here. Yeah, so tomorrow, for Wednesday here, we do have a moderate risk
02:56out and that extends right from along the Red River of Oklahoma and Texas north through
03:02mainly east of basically what we call the I-35 corridor. So basically east of Oklahoma City,
03:09east of Wichita, and then up into the Kansas City area. So Tulsa, Springfield, southeast Kansas,
03:17and a good chunk of eastern Oklahoma will be under the gun tomorrow. As we have that moisture return,
03:24we've got our strong cold front in place, and then certainly the dynamics aloft that are going to
03:30help kick off severe thunderstorms. There will be isolated tornado risk, you know, across this
03:37part of the nation. We haven't really had too many tornado threats here lately, so that will
03:41certainly be one. Large hail will certainly be a possibility with some of those as well,
03:46and then damaging winds. We talked about the dynamics. We've got a lot of wind with this system,
03:51so those stronger storms and just, you know, some of the strong winds out ahead of a well
03:57will be able to to help fuel those storms to then produce some damaging winds, and that's 60 to 70
04:03with a local storm max and maybe even a couple of the storms reaching 80 miles an hour.
04:07And this time of year, the sun sets a little earlier, so the challenge will be for those that
04:12are trying to watch those tornadoes come in, if there's any occurring, they won't be able to do
04:17that at least through that evening hour just because of the change in the seasons here.
04:23AccuWeather severe weather expert Guy Pearson, thanks again for joining us on AccuWeather Early.