Risk of hail, damaging winds to evolve as severe storms reignite over US Plains Wednesday

By Alex Sosnowski, AccuWeather senior meteorologist

April 11,2017, 10:08:16AM,EDT

 

 

Storms will ignite and become locally severe over the central and southern High Plains on Wednesday afternoon and evening.
The new storms will follow localized flooding downpours and severe thunderstorms with hail in the central and eastern parts of Texas into Tuesday evening.
Then, a storm from the Pacific Ocean will push east of the Rockies at midweek.
Storms will erupt from western Texas and eastern New Mexico to western Oklahoma and west-central Kansas, along the boundary between dry air to the west and increasing humidity to the east.
"The greatest threats from the storms will be large hail and powerful wind gusts," according to AccuWeather Lead Storm Warning Meteorologist Eddie Walker.

"While there can be a tornado in a couple of the strongest storms, we believe the tornado threat is minimal, since the base of the clouds associated with the thunderstorms will tend to be rather high above the ground in this case," Walker said.
A funnel cloud has a greater chance of reaching the ground when there is plenty of moisture in the lowest part of the atmosphere, which allows the base of the thunderstorm to be close to the ground.
The most concentrated amount of severe storms will be from the northern Texas Panhandle to the Big Bend area of the Rio Grande River.
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Major cities at risk for locally damaging thunderstorms include Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland, Texas.
Storms in portions of western Oklahoma to central Kansas will tend to be more isolated in nature. However, there is the chance of a locally severe thunderstorm in cities such as Gage, Oklahoma, and Dodge City and Russell, Kansas.
A few clusters of gusty to locally severe thunderstorms may survive and tend to drift farther to the east into portions of central Texas, central Oklahoma and south-central Kansas late Wednesday night.