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AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reports from Hudson, Iowa, where severe weather is expected to bring hail and even flooding to the area in the evening of April 14. Tornadoes can't be ruled out either.
Transcript
00:00What you're looking at here is just kind of a big cloud blob. I know that's not the meteorological
00:05term for it, but right now this is a non-tornadic severe thunderstorm. This is heading toward the
00:10Waterloo area with the potential for golf ball sized hail. This is going to take areas from
00:15Cedar Falls, Waterloo, Orange, just to the north of Hudson. So this is basically going to roll
00:21right through the heart of Cedar Falls and Waterloo with the potential for up to golf
00:26ball sized hail and some probably flooding downpours as well. Would not surprise me to
00:31see some street flooding, urban flooding as this storm rolls through. Again, the severe
00:34thunderstorm warning in effect here till 4.45 p.m. That does include, again, Cedar Falls and
00:41Waterloo. This looks very, very scary coming in from town. I know a lot of folks probably
00:45in the cities here looking at this very, very concerned, rightfully so. This is a big, low-hanging
00:51mass of clouds that you're seeing here on the camera. That right now does not appear tornadic.
00:57The storm earlier had some brief tornadic circulations in it, but kind of some storms
01:02formed near it and merged with it. So the storm's a little bit more disorganized now as opposed
01:07to what it was about 30 minutes ago. That is good news, at least for the time being, it
01:12seems like anyway, that the tornado threat with this particular storm is relatively low,
01:17not non-zero. If you're in Waterloo, especially on the south side, south half of town there,
01:23I would certainly be ready to take action. These storms have a tendency sometimes to spin
01:28up tornadoes very, very quickly. And again, we are talking about a full-fledged supercell,
01:33even though right now the main threat with this is going to be golf ball-sized hail, maybe quite
01:38a bit of it as well. Again, you're looking at a very blocky cloud. I wouldn't call this
01:43necessarily a wall cloud. If it is, it's one of the biggest ones I've ever seen. But this is just
01:50kind of some of the clouds that have formed on the leading edge of this storm. Looks, again,
01:54mighty impressive. I mean, again, if you're in the town of Waterloo right now looking down at this,
02:00this is probably something that definitely has your attention, and rightfully so. Again,
02:03the main threat with this right now for folks in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area is going to be hail
02:08up to golf ball size. Wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of hail with this, and wouldn't
02:13surprise me either, Jeff, if we see hail a little bit bigger than this as well. Again, right now,
02:19no tornado threat. This is a severe thunderstorm warning only. But again, that could change very,
02:24very quickly. So folks in Waterloo particularly, definitely want to make sure you are ready to rock
02:29and roll in case this thing does start to spin up. But in the meantime, we'll keep an eye on
02:34it as it
02:34rolls through Waterloo, and we'll continue to track it as it moves off to the east at about 25 miles
02:38an hour.
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