WHAT: A strong to severe thunderstorm & heavy rainfall. This threat will mostly come with a line of storms along a cold front later on.
WHEN: Mostly after 8:00 pm (as it looks right now)
WHEN DOES THREAT END? The threat should end by 1:00 am for everone on the plateau.
NEXT METEOROLOGIST MARK UPDATE: 4:00 pm, or as needed.
You’ll notice my thoughts are unchanged from this morning. I’m still not too impressed with atmospheric support above, so my threat level will remain low for this outlook. If more data comes in later this afternoon that changes my mind, I’ll be sure and let you know.
Only a few light showers can be seen across the state at this hour. All in all, it’s turning out to be a rather nice afternoon, albeit a bit windy. It certainly is warm, with even some occasional peaks of the sun.
And that’s the problem.
Since our storm system has slowed down so much, our atmosphere now has time to become warmer and more unstable.
We’ll see temps continue to warm this afternoon and the warmer we get the more unstable the atmosphere will become. I’m currently 71 degrees here at the house. With that being said, the atmosphere is still not the most supportive place for severe thunderstorms. That bodes well for us. If this were a more powerful storm system, along with several other factors, we’d have a much more serious situation on our hands. In addition, there’s not a lot of wind shear (change in wind speed and direction with height) and tornadoes like wind shear. That also bodes well for us.
Never the less, we need to be weather aware this evening and into the overnight hours. The greatest risk, by far, is from a damaging straight-line wind gust. Some of those gusts could top 60 mph. With that wind energy on tap, some of the storms may try to spin those winds around a bit and produce a tornado or two. That threat is very low but it’s not zero. Those types of tornadoes are often brief and on the weaker end of the scale.
Also, don’t forget the heavy rainfall threat tonight, as well.
I’ll keep a close eye on things.
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