A severe weather event is possible Saturday from 7 PM to 7 AM Sunday morning including damaging winds, isolated tornadoes, heavy rainfall, and small hail. The threat of afternoon thunderstorms (before 7 PM) has gone down significantly for our viewing area. Therefore, we are turning our attention to the evening and overnight hours when our best chance of severe thunderstorms will be. A line of thunderstorms will move into the region from the west, with a low chance of a thunderstorm or two developing out ahead of the line. The main line will not likely move in until after 10 PM but we have opened our window at 7 PM in case of a storm out ahead of the line, especially for our western counties. While this scenario is not very likely we want to account for it just in case.
These storms that we expect after 10 PM will gain strength to our west and move into the area. With the wind dynamics we have in our region tomorrow we have no reason to believe that we will see weakening below severe limits when they move in. These storms could pack a punch especially with straight line damaging winds, some of these wind gust could gust to 50-70 MPH. It is common in setups like this with the wind dynamics that we have to see a few spin-up tornadoes along the leading edge of the line or with any cell out ahead of that so a few tornado warnings will be possible across the region and recent model runs tonight support that medium tornado risk. The risk of hail is lower with this setup due to the linear nature of the storms, but some small hail is possible with these storms as well.
This is a nighttime severe storm risk including the risk for a few tornadoes so please have ways to receive warnings that will wake you up if you are asleep Saturday night when these storms move in. These storms will be fast moving so make sure if a warning is issued you know where you are going to go to take shelter, the safest place is the lowest floor, in an interior room, and away from windows. Mobile homes and cars are not safe places to be during tornadoes. The next SPC update is at 1 AM and we will have a short update then and then we will do another longer update mid-morning tomorrow. We will be LIVE tomorrow evening if severe weather warnings are needed for the viewing area. Stay with FirstWARN Tri-Cities for updates.
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