Tens of millions of people across the central and southern U.S. will need to stay weather-alert from Friday into Saturday, as an unusually powerful storm system wraps up across the Central Plains and races into the Midwest. A sprawling outbreak of severe weather, including strong tornadoes, is expected on both days, and extreme wildfires could race across the prairies of Texas and Oklahoma on Friday.
Even by the usual wild-weather standards of March, this event could be historic. A surface low intensifying across the Central Plains on Friday is predicted to carve out a central pressure near or below 975 millibars (hPa). This would put it among the strongest lows ever observed in this area.
As of early Friday, the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center (SPC) had issued “moderate risk” outlooks (level 4 out of 5) for both Friday and Saturday, surrounded by broader level 2 and 3 areas (“slight” and “enhanced” risk, see Fig. 1). Strong tornadoes, huge hail, and destructive thunderstorm wind gusts are possible on both days, especially in the moderate-risk areas. The tornado threat is especially serious on Saturday across the South; as the SPC put it, “multiple long-track high-end tornadoes will be possible.”
A fast-evolving setup for severe weather
Two distinct, intense cores of upper-level energy within a broader upper low will rip across the U.S. heartland. The first, more compact impulse (a short wave trough) will drive the intense surface low from Kansas to Minnesota on Friday, with a cold front attached to the low pushing even further east toward the mid-Mississippi Valley by Friday night.
strongest on record f0r any spring day in data going back 80 years.
SPC warned early Friday that the combination of “extremely strong winds, critically low [relative humidity], and receptive fuels across a large swath of the Southern Plains is culminating in an anomalously high-end fire weather threat.”
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
