Possible Strong Or Severe Storms New York, NW Vermont Tonight, Then Heat Breaks

Severe thunderstorms are possible in the yellow areas until'
around midnight tonight. There's a very slight chance
of continued severe weather in the areas in
dark green shading 

Yesterday in northern Minnesota, severe thunderstorms dropped at least one tornado and some gigantic hailstones, some the size of softballs.

The cold front that caused the storms is marching eastward and another round of severe storms was starting to get going near the eastern Great Lakes as of mid afternoon.

They'll probably reach their peak once they get east of Michigan and over that part of Canada near Toronto that juts south between Michigan and New York state toward Lake Erie.

From there, some of the storms will stay pretty strong to severe over northwestern New York toward the St. Lawrence Valley this evening, There, the biggest storm threat is from strong, damaging winds. Maybe there will be a place or two with large hail.

Tornadoes are very unlikely.

This area of storms will then march toward Vermont later this evening. However, the sun's heat will be gone. Hot weather tends to energize storms, and the 90 degree heat of the day will be waning by the time the storms head toward the Green Mountain State.

The upshot is the storms will be weakening pretty rapidly as they come toward Vermont. There might still be some strong, damaging winds with the overnight storms over northwestern Vermont, especially around the Lake Champlain Islands and around and north of St. Albans.

If you live in that section of Vermont, you might want to secure loose objects outside so they don't blow around in those thundery gusts. And be ready to run around and close windows later tonight, say around 11 p.m. or midnight or so  so the rain doesn't get in.

The storms will continue to weaken fast as they move south and east across Vermont into the rest of New England.

The cold front will erase the 90 degree heat and the air quality problems in Vermont we've had today.

The rest of the week will be cool, with highs in the 70s, except some 60s showing up for highs on Wednesday.

Not a whole lot of rain is coming with tonight's showers and storms, which is too bad, as soil conditions are getting pretty dry. Some areas in southern and eastern Vermont won't get any rain at all out of this.

Vermont isn't yet officially in any kind of drought, but some parts of the state are regarded as "abnormally dry" according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

A few more rain showers might pop up on Wednesday, but they won't amount to much. After that, we get another stretch of dry weather with low humidity into next weekend. Temperatures will warm back up to the low 80s by next weekend.