Monday, July 7, 2014

Severe Weather Threat In Vermont, Surrounding AreasToday

The areas in yellow in this map are most at risk
for severe thunderstorms today.  
Severe weather ended Friday (or Saturday, depending upon where you are in the Northeast) and we ended up with a decent weather weekend.

Now, again,  severe thunderstorms again loom for parts of the Northeast, Ohio Valley and parts of the Midwest today.

The greatest chance for a tornado today (a low chance, but still a chance), is southern Nebraska, southern Minnesota, and of all places, eastern New York and most of Vermont.

Again, there's no guarantee of severe storms, but it might happen.

Early Monday morning, there was a big batch of showers and storms over western New York and southern Ontario. These might actually interfere with the development of storms later in eastern New York and Vermont, but I'm not sure.

On the one hand, the storms early Monday might cool and stabilize the air, and block the sun, making it harder for stronger storms to develop this afternoon. On the other hand, outflow boundaries, which are bursts of air coming from those storms, might act like mini-cold fronts to trigger severe storms.

We'll have to wait and see how that plays out. But the Storm Prediction Center says a few supercell storms might get going in eastern New York and Vermont, which could produce a brief tornado.

But the main threat from today's storms are strong, damaging straight line winds, minus the tornadoes, and torrential rains. There could be some local flash flood issues in Vermont and eastern New York in the more persistent thunderstorms.

The weather system causing these potentially dangerous storms extends through the Ohio Valley and on into places like Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska. There's the potential for severe storms and perhaps a tornado in all these areas.  

More strong thunderstorms could hit the Northeast, including Vermont, on Tuesday as well.
A classic looking tornado spins through
Iowa Sunday evening. 

There was a pretty dramatic tornado in Iowa last night, part of a series of tornadoes in that state. It hit at sunset, and had a unique pink color.

Most of the Iowa twisters hit rural areas, so damage wasn't as horrible as it could have been had any of the storms mowed through cities.

As always, large, damaging hail is a threat with any of today's storms. And as I've noted, it's been the season of giant hail with huge damage from these storms in all corners of the country.

It's amazing there hadn't been any deaths or serious injuries from people getting hit by hail this year, or in recent years for that matter.

Luck ran out over the weekend when  three people were seriously injured when large hail fell on them in North Dakota over the weekend.

Hail injuries are rare in the United States and deaths from giant hailstones are even rarer, says The Vane, which is Gawker's weather page. 

The last time somebody died in the United States from being hit by a hailstone was a Texas teenager in 2000 who was trying to move his truck out of a storm.

The people in North Dakota might have been trapped outside with nowhere to hide. But other people tempt fate, like this idiot who was calmly walking down the street as baseball sized hail fell around him.

Somehow, he didn't get hit hard. Had such a large hailstone hit him on the head, he probably would have died, since these big hailstones can drop from a thunderstorm at up to 100 mph.

Here's the video:


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