Meteorologists Keeping Close Eye On the Skies as Storms Approach

Meteorologists are keeping a close eye on a storm system moving towards the Midwest from Colorado today, creating a risk of strong to severe storms this evening in Southeast Iowa.

“We have a strong late season storm moving up from Colorado, and what that’s going to do is produce increasing winds and low clouds with showers developing by late afternoon,” said Meteorologist Bill Nichols from the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities.

Nichols says that the impact of the system will depend on instabilities in the atmosphere as the system travels across the country.

“There is the potential for some strong to severe storms, but the risk and confidence is still highly uncertain because of what we call marginal instability,” Nichols said, “The criteria for severe is right on the grey area, so if we don’t get enough instability, we may not get severe at all.”

A severe storm leaves open the possibility of strong straight-line winds and possibly even an isolated tornado. But severe or not, one thing is for sure.

“Even if we don’t get severe [storms], we’re going to get a lot of wind tonight and tomorrow.” Nichols said, “30, 40 mile per hour winds, maybe even higher, for at least 12 hours or more. It may last well into Thursday.”

Not a lot of rain is expected to accompany this event. We can expect ¼-1/2 inch for our area.