Hail and gusty winds hammer parts of Kansas as severe storms cut through the central US

AccuWeather

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.

Transcript

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.

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