U.S. Plains Braces For Severe Storms, While Epic, Weird Mideast Storm Proves Fatal

There hasn't been a tornado in Oklahoma yet this year, which is very bizarre and record breaking.

Massive flooding in Tel Aviv
this week. 

It looks like there's a good chance that Oklahoma's good luck in the tornado department will come to an end next week. (Of course, Oklahoma has had terrible luck with wildfires and droughts this year.)

A classic mid-spring weather pattern is unfolding, especially in the middle of the country, and that means there's the risk of severe storms and tornados across the Plains and Midwest.

Meteorologists are confident this will happen. But they're not confident as to how bad this might get. The main ingredients for a severe weather outbreak are certainly there in the middle of the week:

Dry air coming in from the west, wet air coming in from the Gulf of Mexico, a decent sized storm and winds veering with height.

That's a standard recipe for spring tornadoes in the United States.

Those ingredients must come together though just perfectly to cause a significant, scary, deadly and destructive tornado outbreak. You really can't tell if that will happen often until hours before the event.

With a decent amount of luck, maybe there won't be many tornadoes, and those that do form will be relatively weak. That would mean just your standard issue damage -- local power outages, trees down, barn roofs blown off, a few broken windows - bad but they'll deal with it.

Or, if there are strong tornadoes, there's a lot of open space in the middle of the country. If a strong tornado forms, we can pray that it stays over open farm country and causes little damage.

The worst-case scenario in this one is a strong tornado goes through a populated area, like Moore, Oklahoma in 1999 and 2013, or Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2011. Not likely, but possible this time.

MIDDLE EAST CHAOS

Outbreaks of severe weather and tornadoes are pretty common in the United States during the spring. But extreme storms aren't so common in the Mideast, and they had a doozy this week.

An unusually strong storm came off the Mediterraneann Sea during the week. As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang put it, few countries in the region were untouched.

Ten teenagers died when caught in flash flooding near the Dead Sea in Israel. Four other youths died in the region during the flooding. Huge amounts of hail buried parts of Syria. Massive dust storms engulfed Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Parts of Israel had a third of the normal year's worth of rain in a day or two. Tel Aviv, Israel, had an inch of rain in an hour. Jerusalem had two inches. Both cities were awash in destructive flash floods.

Severe flooding also hit Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.

The storm that hit the Mideast had plenty of cold air aloft, and plenty of moisture from the Mediterranean. The combination made the air extremely unstable, which caused the massive downpours and winds.

If there was a bright side to the chaos and tragedy from the weather in the Mideast, it's that the strom hit during a serious drought, so it partly re-filled reservoirs and alleviated the dryness.

Videos of the Mideast show the chaos.

Here's a view out of a plane window as the aircraft flies into a massive dust storm this week in Saudi Arabia. The plane landed safely:



Check out this incredibe hailstorm in Arad, Israel:



Here's a street in Jerusalem overrun with water. Notice tables and chairs floating by:



Tel Aviv, Israel was chaotic, too, in the hail and flooding: