00:00Here in the forecast feed, we want to talk about a stormy week.
00:04Every day this week will bring the continued risk for severe thunderstorms, at least somewhere
00:09on the map between the South Central U.S., the Midwest, and the Great Lakes region.
00:14And some of this is actually partially beneficial because we've been dealing with drought.
00:18Let's take a look at the drought monitor before we get into the details here.
00:21And you can see that we have really much of, much of the Southern U.S., really most of
00:27the Southern U.S., and a good chunk of the Midwest also facing some form of drought here
00:33as we step into the beginning of April.
00:36Now, the new maps will be in on Thursday, data being collected every Tuesday, released on
00:42Thursday.
00:42But again, we're not going to expect many big changes.
00:45Really, the states with the least drought in the nation, a little bit of Kentucky, West
00:48Virginia, Southern Ohio, North Dakota, and really California for the most part.
00:51Otherwise, a lot of drought across the South.
00:54So we're going to be taking you through the next several days, and I want to jump into
00:58the models first, and then we'll look at how this plays out with our official forecast
01:02day by day.
01:04So here we have the upper-level map that's showing us the GFS model forecast, the American
01:11model and then the European model forecast, for the flow aloft.
01:14And what you might notice is these bright colors, they're showing areas of spin in the atmosphere.
01:20So if we go to Wednesday evening, for example, we have a strong low-pressure system off the
01:24northwest coast that's bringing some snow to the Cascades, rain to many other areas in
01:28northern California.
01:29We have another area of low-pressure crossing Colorado.
01:32East of there, we have a disturbance.
01:34And there's even another little disturbance, a little trough.
01:37I don't want to commit it to a full-scale low-pressure system.
01:40Another little blip of color across the interior northeast.
01:43So these areas where there's a trough and low-pressure systems are areas of spin.
01:48If you're east of one of them, the atmosphere is going to lead to some lift.
01:52That's going to get air moving up.
01:54It's going to produce clouds, showers, and thunderstorms.
01:56So we tend to look for the sharper troughs.
01:58Here's a sharp trough.
02:00It's even tilted a little bit up left to slightly bottom right.
02:03And that's going to be a pretty nasty little storm system carrying some severe weather potential
02:07Thursday into the Midwest.
02:09And look at this.
02:10Behind it, another one moving through the Rockies.
02:13So there are two primary storm systems here that we'll be tracking for Wednesday to Thursday.
02:19That's this one.
02:20And then Friday to Saturday.
02:22That's this one.
02:23In terms of severe thunderstorm impacts.
02:26And you can see as we get into Friday, the first one lifts out.
02:29That's going to be basically history lifting up into eastern Canada.
02:32But a big dip in the jet stream.
02:35We have colder air aloft under one of these.
02:38We have moisture from the Gulf present here in the low levels of the atmosphere.
02:42And that's going to fuel some more thunderstorms Friday and then into Saturday, moving through
02:47more of the Mississippi Valley, parts of the Ohio Valley, where you're east of the big
02:50dip in the jet stream.
02:52So that's kind of the big picture, broad scale view.
02:55Let's go down to the ground here.
02:57And we do have one of these storm systems moving through the Great Lakes here, even in
03:00the short term, this Tuesday night to Wednesday morning.
03:03And all night long, Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, we're going to be dealing with some
03:06storms and showers in this area around the Midwest into the interior northeast.
03:11But that next storm system, number one on our map here, I'm going to replot the low.
03:16Here it is.
03:17Just kind of highlighting it in a greater fashion.
03:19And that's going to be producing some strong thunderstorms.
03:22We've got flow out of the south and southwest in the low levels of the atmosphere.
03:26Aloft winds coming in in a different angle.
03:29And that's going to lead to some wind shear.
03:31Winds twisted, different directions at different altitudes.
03:33So there's some wind shear.
03:35There's some instability.
03:35We're going to see some storms break out late Wednesday, Wednesday evening, again erupting
03:40and pooling northeast through the southern plains and into parts of the Ozark Plateau.
03:44And then Thursday, that storm system lifts north.
03:47By the way, I haven't mentioned this, but you can see a lot of blue on the map.
03:49There's a snowy side to this.
03:51Heavy snow in parts of Minnesota.
03:53Some areas locally, six to 12 inches of snow.
03:56Minneapolis, we're forecasting one to three inches.
03:58But along this front here, one cold front, and there's another cold front tied to storm
04:03system number two that will be following.
04:05There's going to be severe weather.
04:06Here comes Friday.
04:07Storm system number one pulls away through northern Maine.
04:11Number two, Friday evening, is going to produce some more strong storms.
04:15Here's the stronger front.
04:16This is actually the caboose.
04:17It's the final storm in a sequence of storms that will be impacting the U.S. here all week long.
04:23We've been talking about we had severe weather Monday night.
04:25We're dealing with more Tuesday night, Wednesday to Thursday with storm, the midweek storm.
04:30Then Friday to Saturday with the caboose.
04:32And the caboose often, the final storm in a sequence of storms, often brings more lasting
04:36change and it often produces some significant impacts.
04:40In this case, we may be dealing with some flooding along with damaging winds, hail, and isolated
04:44tornadoes.
04:44Flooding partly because of the cumulative effect of the rain here, storm after storm.
04:50Here's Saturday, Passover in progress, moving into Easter Sunday.
04:53Today, cold front rolling east through the northeast, a warm morning and then a colder
04:57evening on Easter Sunday as the storm system rolls through.
05:00You're going to notice heavy rain here.
05:03We showed you the drought monitor, but look at this by Easter Sunday morning.
05:06Some of you in that magenta color could see three or four inches of rain over the course
05:11of the week.
05:11That's the GFS model.
05:12Let's go to the European.
05:14Similar message.
05:15The placement specifically a little bit different.
05:17I see a nugget of 4.2 inches near St. Louis with the European model.
05:21Now, one wild card, one variable here that's not fully abundant with all of this is CAPE,
05:29convective available potential energy.
05:31We're looking at instability, the driving factor behind lift in the atmosphere.
05:35And you can see that there are some areas where we have a lot of blue and a few hints
05:38of that kind of greenish yellow in southern Kansas on Wednesday.
05:43But then into Thursday, you can see up into the Midwest, there will be some severe weather
05:47up into parts of Illinois, but it's generally in the blue and not quite in the yellow.
05:51So we're dealing with triple digit CAPE, but not four digit CAPE.
05:56In other words, maybe 500 to 1,000 joules per kilogram and not one or two or 3,000 joules
06:02per kilogram.
06:03So there's a little bit of a limiting factor there.
06:05Friday, a little more instability in the southern plains.
06:07Saturday, into the area around the Ohio Valley, kind of limited CAPE, even though the wind
06:12energy aloft is pretty abundant.
06:14So I'm going to close out the model and show you our forecast to close this out.
06:18And let's go back to Wednesday evening and Wednesday afternoon through the night.
06:23Severe weather with what we're calling the Wednesday-Thursday storm rolls into the southern
06:28plains.
06:29And then into Thursday, we have two zones with a moderate risk around Davenport and the
06:33Quad Cities, and another one, northern Indiana into parts of Michigan.
06:37Then the next storm, the caboose.
06:39Friday, Kansas into western Missouri.
06:42Saturday, remember I showed you limited instability, but strong wind energy, a big zone here with
06:46severe weather likely.
06:48That's your forecast feed for now.
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