Outdoor events, including football games, may be disrupted this weekend across the Mississippi Valley as severe thunderstorms bring lightning, damaging winds, and hail.
The risk of severe weather is predicted to increase this weekend when a new storm forms over the Mississippi Valley, strengthens, and moves into the Great Lakes region. Some of the intense thunderstorms on Saturday could spawn tornadoes, according to AccuWeather meteorologists.
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Storms moving across the Plains before the weekend are likely to be heavy and gusty in some areas. A few storms may turn severe, resulting in golf-ball-sized hail, damaging wind gusts, and isolated flash flooding. Regardless of the ferocity of the storms, lightning strikes will endanger football games on Friday evening.
Severe thunderstorms may be isolated from Friday evening to overnight, although a few powerful storms may form from central Oklahoma to central Iowa.
As the new storm collects moisture from the Gulf and moves northeast across the Mississippi Valley on Saturday afternoon and evening, thunderstorms are predicted to form and turn severe from northeastern Texas and northern Louisiana to central Illinois and Indiana.
Within this area, a more concentrated zone of severe thunderstorms is forecast, as well as an increased danger of a few tornadoes from central Arkansas to southeastern Missouri and southwest Illinois.
AccuWeather’s moderate to severe weather risk zone includes large cities including St. Louis, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee.
If the storms form a consistent line of severe weather, there is a greater risk that they will move into the midsection of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as northern Alabama, later that night.
Lightning from any thunderstorm could create delays at football games, golf courses, and other outdoor events in the Mississippi Valley on Saturday.
Even in the northern section of this area, significant wind gusts can occur in the absence of thunder or lightning.
On Sunday, the greatest chance of severe thunderstorms will be from the central Appalachians to southern Ontario. As the storms hit Atlanta in the afternoon and perhaps stick together until the evening near Charlotte, flight delays may develop during one of the weekend’s busiest travel times.
On Sunday, particularly in the northern region of the risk, significant wind gusts may develop even in the absence of thunder and lightning often from Kentucky to Ohio and Michigan and eastward to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and western New York.
Strong, potentially damaging wind gusts in any storm through Sunday may be brief (just a few minutes), but they could still create interruption.
Blustery weather is likely to persist from the Midwest to the Appalachians into early next week.
