A tornado watch is in effect until 6 a.m. CT for northeast Texas, southwest Arkansas and northwest Louisiana, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center said.
Severe storms moving through the region may produce tornadoes, wind gusts up to 75 mph and golf-ball sized hail, forecasters said. More than five million people are in the watch area, including the cities of Dallas, Texarkana, which straddles the Texas-Arkansas border, and Shreveport, Louisiana.
Flash flood warnings were also issued in the Dallas area overnight, where between 1 to 3 inches of rain had already fallen and another 2 inches was possible.
“Be especially cautious at night when it is harder to recognize the dangers of flooding,” the NWS Fort Worth office said.
The line of severe weather is the latest in a series of storms that have battered the southern US for three weeks straight.
Bill Bunting of the Storm Prediction Center told CNN weather systems can fall into repetitive cycles.
“The atmosphere has a fairly chaotic component to it, but it does occasionally get into patterns where we see this repeatability. We’ve seen it in all seasons,” said Bunting. “Unfortunately, for this past month, and certainly for the week ahead, the threat for severe weather is going to be present again, in many of the same areas that have already seen enough severe weather just over the past four weeks.”
The very moist air flowing northward from the Gulf of Mexico, which has helped the storms develop over the last few weeks, is once again what we will see this week,” Bunting said.
When to expect the worst conditions
The storm will bring a wave of severe conditions to different parts of the South throughout the day Tuesday, CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford said. Tornadoes, damaging winds and hail are the main threats.
Here’s the expected timing of the worst conditions:
- Jackson, Mississippi, will see severe storms begin around 5 a.m. and they will continue through about 10:30 a.m.
- Cities from Nashville to Montgomery, Alabama, will see severe storms begin around 8 a.m. and last until around 1:30 p.m.
- Atlanta will see the threat of severe conditions increase around 1:30 p.m. and last through 5 p.m.
- A wide swath of cities in a comma shape from Charlotte and Wilmington, North Carolina, to Colombia and Charleston in South Carolina, and swinging around to Savannah, Georgia, and Panama City, Florida, are expected to see the worst conditions from 6 p.m. through 10 p.m.
By Wednesday, a separate system will form, bringing another round of storms to the South and extending the severe threat for another day.
“A second system develops on the heels of the first as an upper trough deepens strongly and digs down across the central Plains and eventually the Deep South,” said the NWS office in Atlanta.
By Thursday, the threat diminishes, as the storms push off the East Coast. While the system is primarily bringing storms to the South, we will still see rain Thursday for much of the Eastern Seaboard.
Anywhere from Florida to New England will see rain, so we could see a few travel delays at some major airports Wednesday, and again Thursday, as this system moves through.
CNN’s Jennifer Gray, Gene Norman and Chris Boyette contributed to this report.
