Thunderstorms brought torrential rain, large hail, flashing lightning and a risk for tornadoes from Illinois to Alabama on April 18.
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00:00Now, other areas like Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a place with recent tornado history, has had some other severe weather, and we've had a nasty storm.
00:09Look at that lightning captured by Brandon Clement.
00:11Now we take you to St. Louis, Missouri, and here we're looking out from under the backside of one round of storms.
00:18Now we can begin to see some clouds off in the distance tied to the second round of showers.
00:22That'll be far weaker than the heavier, intense thunderstorms that rolled through earlier.
00:27We're still tracking a number of areas off to the east with a tornado threat and damaging winds.
00:32So let's take a look at what's going on.
00:33We're down to 67 in St. Louis.
00:35Temperatures have really dropped there significantly in the past hour because of a round of nasty storms that rolled right through the region here.
00:42And as we take a look at this band of thunderstorms, again, you can see it's a squall line.
00:47Now, if this were in a perfect straight line, we would have straight-line wind concerns, and that would be it.
00:53Unfortunately, we're dealing with, again, some zones here, some areas where there are significant kinks along this.
01:00And along those kinks, we have the risk for isolated tornadoes very frequently in cases like what we're seeing here in a few of these areas specifically.
01:11So we can zoom in on a few of these.
01:13And because it's such a broad-brush band of heavy rain and gusty winds with isolated tornado potential,
01:20the National Weather Service has been issuing larger-scale tornado warnings to kind of assess the risk here.
01:25And we're going to get a little more specific east of St. Louis here.
01:29Areas around Carlisle, Illinois, have some strong inbound wind, strong outbound wind to the south.
01:35So, again, there's cause for concern here.
01:37As I switch back over to the precipitation scan, again, this is one of those areas where we have one of those kinks along the line.
01:44And then farther south, we can switch back over to the velocity scan here.
01:48And in general, we have inbound wind.
01:50We've got strong outbound wind.
01:52And there is the risk for an isolated tornado embedded within this as well.
01:57But overall, straight-line winds are a very significant concern here too.
02:02Now, we've seen some reports of wind damage and flash flooding.
02:04Here you can see large tree blown over in southern Illinois, marine Illinois, trees down, trees in houses, power lines down as well.
02:12And there likely will be more reports that come out of these storms because it's been such a widespread event.
02:18The priority there for those at the Weather Service is likely to have been to stay on top of warnings
02:22as opposed to to prioritize individual storm reports.
02:26And they'll come out in due time.
02:27But from Shelby County, Illinois, down into Fayette County, Illinois, Clinton County, Washington County, into Randolph County,
02:34each of those areas has the risk for an isolated tornado.
02:38But on a broader scale, straight-line wind damage is a big concern connecting the dots here between any of these storms.
02:45There you can see a wall cloud there from Mississippi earlier and heading down into the area around Jackson, Mississippi.
02:53We're tracking a nasty storm that can be traced back to that video that we captured earlier,
02:58that Brandon Clement captured earlier north of Jackson, Mississippi.
03:02And as we take a look at the storm hazards associated with this cell, it's getting very close to the radar site here.
03:07But as we look at the storm hazards associated with this one, there is a signal that we could be facing some large hail.
03:14In fact, if we were to grab that black pixel there, it's going to indicate potentially even larger hail up to two inches in diameter.
03:21Sometimes this runs a little hot, so at least hail to the size of half dollars might be the best forecast for that particular cell.
03:29We'll have to stay on top of that.
03:30Looking at reports there, we had some tremendous flooding earlier in Eudora, Arkansas,
03:35with video and photos in that area showing water approaching businesses.
03:40And some of the 24-hour radar estimates for rainfall were just through the roof here,
03:46as some areas may have seen upwards of 10 and 11 inches of rain in extreme southeast Arkansas
03:53and other areas here in northeast Louisiana and beyond.
03:56We're still tracking also a tornado threat here into an area way southwest of Dallas.
04:00This is into Lambassas County, new tornado warning.
04:03We're looking way up into the atmosphere here, so high in the atmosphere,
04:06there are a couple of areas of rotation that might translate down to a tornado risk at ground level.
04:12A quick look at the current tornado or severe thunderstorm watches.
04:15These are severe thunderstorm watches into Indiana, western Kentucky.
04:18The newest watch runs until 2 a.m. central, 3 a.m. eastern,
04:21and also into southern Illinois, southeast Missouri, western Arkansas, eastern parts of Oklahoma,
04:25and other areas here into Texas, too.
04:28Some ongoing tornado threats and damaging wind risks in many of these areas as well.
04:33So we're going to take you into a look beyond the current severe threat into some flash flood potential farther south,
04:41and overall beyond the storms that we're tracking this evening and tonight in many of these areas.
04:46They'll be weakening after they hit areas around I-65 later into the night.
04:51Another big storyline will involve the areas like the southern and south-central U.S.
04:55We had a significant drought at the beginning of the year,
04:58and that's been largely eradicated by the heavy rain at times, January, February, March, April.
05:03We're going to do it again here early this past week.
05:06We saw some very heavy rain, and the tail of the same front that caused all the trouble today to the north,
05:10it's going to get hung up over Texas.
05:12So look at the rain that expands, and this evolves into a pretty significant rainmaker,
05:162 to 4 inches of rain possible from Austin to Shreveport this weekend.