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Tens of millions of Americans, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Baltimore, could face severe thunderstorms tonight through Wednesday, with tornadoes possible in some states.
A large storm system hitting much of the central United States in the coming days is expected to bring severe storms to Kansas and Nebraska on Monday night, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center said.
The two states could also see strong tornadoes, while parts of Oklahoma, Missouri and Virginia face a slight risk.
WEST VIRGINIA HAD 5 TORNADOES LAST WEEK, MORE THAN DOUBLE THE AVERAGE YEAR
Scattered strong storms are also expected, bringing high winds, hail and flash flooding.
After passing through the Great Plains, the NWS says the storm system could move into the Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley areas on Tuesday and bring “severe weather and isolated flash flooding.”
Southern Iowa, northern Missouri and central Illinois face the greatest threat of “significant potential for hail and tornadoes,” the agency said Tuesday.
The risk of tornadoes forming Monday night over parts of Kansas and Nebraska will increase with the development of a few discrete supercells, the NWS said. Those are the tall, anvil-shaped producers of tornadoes and hail that have a powerful, rotating updraft of wind that often lasts for hours.
May is generally considered the midpoint of tornado season, said Harold Brooks, a tornado scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
Brooks said late April to mid-May is when the strongest tornadoes that cause fatalities typically appear.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in those estimates,” Brooks added, because of how much each tornado season varies from year to year.
Some scientists believe that in recent decades, tornadoes in the United States have been changing, with more spins in states along the Mississippi River and further east. But scientists aren’t entirely sure why this happens.
One possible factor could be that the western Great Plains are becoming drier thanks to climate change, said Joe Strus, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, “so precipitation has shifted a little bit to the east.”
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