00:00Right now, we turn to Guy Pearson, who is joining us from our Severe Weather Center in Wichita.
00:05Guy, thanks for being with us and are you ready for Severe Weather 101?
00:11Oh, we are. It's with, you know, the first sort of big push in severe weather this year,
00:17we're ready to talk about the basics here. All right, so let's get to our graphic here and
00:22we're going to work on filling this in together and talk about all the ingredients we need for
00:26severe weather, the warmth, the moisture, the energy, and we'll assign some categories to it.
00:31First, let's start with the warmth that starts to move through as we head into the day on Saturday.
00:39Yep, so on Saturday, we get, you know, the main storm system kicking out of the southwest here.
00:45We get our temperatures, you know, really climbing back looking well into the 80s and a lot of places
00:50bringing a lot of that warmth out ahead of this storm system coming out of the southwest. So
00:56that's going to be check mark number one for our severe weather. Yeah, high some 20 degrees above
01:01the historical average, much warmer than the temperatures right now, and it's really dry
01:05right now, but that's going to change as well. Yep, certainly. Like typically we see with systems
01:12coming out of the southwest like this, you have that strong southerly, southeasterly winds really
01:17bringing that moisture from the gulf back to the north, and certainly as, you know, the last piece
01:22we sort of talk about here, we have all that moisture ramp up, moving north all the way
01:29up into the, you know, central Mississippi Valley there. So we have plenty of moisture to work with
01:34in this scenario as well, and that would be check mark number two. All right, and then we measure the
01:40energy with wind. Take a look at the scale there and the darkest colors that start to show up. What
01:45do you see when you look at this? So when I see this, you know, there's lots of, you know, we're
01:52looking in that higher end range of 80 to 100 miles an hour, 80 to 95 in that sort of wind speed,
02:02and anytime you're talking that strong, that's a lot of dynamic energy. You know, when we initially
02:06saw this system come into the west coast, it had all kinds of synoptic wind with it. It's, you know,
02:12bringing that energy. It's traversing the southern Rockies, and as it starts to eject out here,
02:18that energy is going to ramp back up, especially as the surface low then starts to develop very
02:23late in the day tomorrow, and especially tomorrow night. So all the check marks are listed when we
02:29look at the warmth, moisture, and energy. Some of these you could argue may be more of a medium high,
02:34but when we look at our severe weather risk, we do have the high risk there, especially central
02:40into Mississippi. Yep, certainly. You know, we do have, you know, all the main ingredients we need
02:48for severe weather to occur, and then most like most often, it's how do all those come together
02:53at the time, and then how, which then determines how big an event unfolds. So we have everything
02:59sort of put together here, and certainly northeastern Louisiana across Mississippi
03:05into even southwestern Tennessee near Memphis there. That's going to be the primary area that
03:11will be towards later in the day. So we're, you know, I know the sun's up a little bit later now.
03:17Sunset's not quite as early, but still we're talking, you know, as the severe weather is going
03:22to start to ramp up, you know, probably more in the four to six o'clock time range across the western
03:28half of that high area, but as it moves east across, it will be nightfall, and so you certainly
03:34want to be aware of what's going on in the evening hours, eight to ten o'clock across this area,
03:40because that's really when it's going to be moving through. It will be dark. You need to be paying
03:45attention to the AccuWeather app and understanding what's going on with the weather around you,
03:49as well as, you know, other sources as well. And Guy, when we talk about tornadoes, all tornadoes
03:56can be deemed strong, but when your team warns of strong tornadoes, exactly what kind of strength
04:02are we looking at? Yeah, typically you're talking potentially EF1, EF2, EF3 type tornadoes. This is
04:11probably one of those scenarios. It's probably more, if we had one of the strongest tornadoes,
04:16it's probably going to be EF2, EF3, would be my initial thought with this. I don't think certainly,
04:23I don't think we're going to have all the right conditions, you know, to have something that may
04:27be the top end of the scale, but certainly a little bit more. I know we talked earlier today
04:31about a weaker EF0 tornado from a couple days ago. We will certainly have, in all likelihood,
04:37some stronger tornadoes than that, that'll, you know, certainly be a category or two above that.
04:43Severe weather expert Guy Pearson, thank you so much for all your knowledge on the
04:47topic here and keeping people safe as we head into the weekend.
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