First East Coast Severe Weather Of Season Departs. Snow In New England?

Lightning over Washington DC Monday. Photo
from Elayne Burke via Twitter.  

The first real out break of severe thunderstorms of the season hit the East Coast Monday, with tornado watches over a wide area from Georgia to Pennsylvania.

So far, there have been no reports of actual tornadoes, but a few rotating supercell storms came close to producing tornadoes, particularly in one storm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

There were plenty of reports of large hail and some of damaging winds.

The thunderstorms were pretty much departing the East Coast early this morning, but the parent storm system responsible for the hazardous weather is going to hang around for awhile.

A long while, apparently.

It'll pretty much stall over southeastern Quebec, all the while feeding moist, increasingly cool air into New England through at least Sunday.

Nasty looking thunderstorm near Rochester, N.Y.
Monday. Photo from James Montronus, via Twitter.  

That means on and off showers through then, though there will be brief periods of drier air, with glimpses of sun, especially this afternoon.

The air will keep getting cooler over New England through the week as the storm feeds chilly air down from Canada. This means snow.

Before you get scared and think we'll get what Boston got in February, relax. Mountains of northern New York and New England will probably get a few to several inches of snow out of this.

At night, valleys in the North Country could get slushy coatings of snow Thursday and Friday nights,  maybe an inch or two here and there, but that will melt each afternoon as readings get above freezing.

It is late April after all.

The good news about this stuck low pressure in eastern Canada is it will suppress any new storm systems to the south.

Jennifer Blanchard took this photo of snow falling
in Glover, Vermont yesterday morning. More snow
is due in the mountains later this week. 

That means the chances of more severe thunderstorm and tornado outbreaks in the nation are pretty limited for the next week or more.  

It looks like Texas and the Gulf Coast could get some bad storms over the next couple of days, but that's about it.

At least for now.

Elsewhere in the world, there was rough, severe weather, too. A tornado caused damage in a Brazil city.

Severe flooding and damaging winds hit parts of Australia, especially near Sydney, killing at least three people.

Here's a house floating away in Dungog, Australia yesterday: