Rounds of severe weather take aim at central US into Monday by Renee DuffAccuWeather•Clusters of heavy to severe thunderstorms will sweep through the central United States into Monday, threatening to not only disrupt outdoor plans, but also inflict damage in some communities.Cookouts over Father’s Day weekend may have to be brought inside, and dads spending the holiday golfing, fishing or biking will need to keep a close watch on the sky.”Whether storms become violent or not, all storms can pose lightning dangers for those with outdoor plans,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski said.As AccuWeather predicted, the severe weather dangers began late this past week with violent storms erupting over the central Plains on Thursday and then the southern Plains on Friday.Pieces of energy high in the atmosphere will continue to stream out of the Rockies into early next week, helping to spark off stormy weather across the center of the country on a daily basis.
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Forecasters anticipate a broad area of the nation’s midsection to endure thunderstorms at the start of the weekend, any of which have the potential to become locally heavy and damaging. Chicago, St. Louis and Tulsa, Oklahoma are among the cities that can endure drenching downpours at times into Saturday evening.
The threat for organized severe weather, however, is expected to remain focused in the two ends of these downpours.
A line of thunderstorms from north-central Nebraska through the central and eastern Dakotas may produce damaging winds and hail, as well as separate area in the southern Plains.
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Lubbock, San Angelo and Amarillo are all Texas cities that could be impacted by the isolated severe weather.
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„Sunday may bring the most widespread threat for severe thunderstorms,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Jake Sojda.
Around 10 million Americans spanning eight states could face dangerous storms on Father’s Day. The late afternoon into the overnight hours will be the times most prime for severe weather.
„Anyone spending the day outdoors on Father’s Day in the Plains will certainly need to be weather aware,” Sojda said.
Those outdoors can utilize AccuWeather’s exclusive MinuteCast® for their location to determine exactly when stormy weather will arrive.
Wind gusts within the storms late Sunday can reach an AccuWeather Local StormMax™ of 80 mph, which can easily topple trees, power lines and 18-wheelers on an open highway. Hail, downpours and isolated tornadoes can also occur.
On Saturday, The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center reported tornadoes in Winnebago, Wisconsin and Blaine, Nebraska.
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Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Dodge City, Wichita and Topeka, Kansas; Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri; Omaha and Grand Island, Nebraska; Sioux City, Iowa; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, are among the communities that could be rocked by violent weather as the weekend comes to a close.
With the dangers continuing into the overnight hours, it will be important for residents to have a way to be notified that severe weather is on its way, such as by keeping a cellphone on with the volume turned up or having a weather radio handy.
Where exactly the clusters of thunderstorms track during Sunday night will have implications on Monday’s severe weather risk area.
AccuWeather meteorologists anticipate at the very least heavy thunderstorms to threaten a corridor from the upper Great Lakes to the southern Plains, with pockets of severe weather in-between.
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The best chance for severe weather lies in a corridor between Cedar Rapids, Iowa and the northern suburbs of Oklahoma City. It is in this region that more widespread wind gusts up to 70 mph as well as hail is expected.
At this time, AccuWeather meteorologists continue to monitor for the threat of severe weather as this storm moves eastward throughout the week. Should the storm continue to remain potent, it may bring a swath of severe thunderstorms to the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley by Tuesday.
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Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
Arctic records its hottest temperature ever
Alarming heat scorched Siberia on Saturday as the small town of Verkhoyansk (67.5°N latitude) reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, 32 degrees above the normal high temperature. If verified, this is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded in Siberia and also the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle, which begins at 66.5°N.
The town is 3,000 miles east of Moscow and further north than even Fairbanks, Alaska. On Friday, the city of Caribou, Maine, tied an all-time record at 96 degrees Fahrenheit and was once again well into the 90s on Saturday. To put this into perspective, the city of Miami, Florida, has only reached 100 degrees one time since the city began keeping temperature records in 1896.
Likely the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic happened today-100.4 F- What’s happening in Siberia this year is nothing short of remarkable. The kind of weather we expect by 2100, 80 years early. For perspective Miami has only reached 100 degrees once on record. https://t.co/WDPRmLRD4d
— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) June 20, 2020
Verkhoyansk is typically one of the coldest spots on Earth. This past November, the area reached nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, one of the first spots to drop that low in the winter of 2019-2020. The scene below is certainly more characteristic of eastern Siberia.
Reaching 100 degrees in or near the Arctic is almost unheard of. Although the reading is questionable, back in 1915 the town of Prospect Creek, Alaska, not quite as far north as Verkhoyansk, is reported to have reached near 100 degrees. And in 2010 a town a few miles south of the Arctic circle in Russia reached 100.
As a result of the hot-dry conditions right now, numerous fires rage nearby, and smoke is visible for thousands of miles on Satellite images.
Satellite image today showing extensive smoke and fires east of Verkhoyansk. Blue coloured ice in Laptev Sea is an indication of melting ice and there is lots of open water visible in the East Siberian Sea. pic.twitter.com/BemW0fccrq
— Kilkenny Weather (@kilkennyweather) June 20, 2020
This heat is not an isolated occurrence. Parts of Siberia have been sizzling for weeks and running remarkably above normal since January. May featured astonishing warmth in western Siberia, where some locales were 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, not just for a day, but for the month. As a whole, western Siberia averaged 10 degrees above normal for May, obliterating anything previously experienced.
On May 23, the Siberian town of Khatanga, far north of the Arctic Circle, hit 78 degrees Fahrenheit. This was 46 degrees above normal and shattered the previous record by a virtually unheard-of 22 degrees. On June 9, Nizhnyaya Pesha, an area 900 miles northeast of Moscow, near the Arctic Ocean’s Barents Sea, hit a sweltering 86 degrees Fahrenheit, a staggering 30 degrees above normal.
What’s perhaps even more impressive is that this relative warmth has persisted since December, with average temperatures in western Siberia 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal — doubling the previous departure from average in 2016.
The average heat across Russia from January to May is so remarkable that it matches what’s projected to be normal by the year 2100 if current trends in heat-trapping carbon emissions continue. In the image below, the data point for 2020 is almost off the charts, and matches what climate models expect to be typical many decades from now.
A remarkable event indeed. A taste of the average conditions at the end of the century under a high emission scenario (RCP 8.5) in the MPI climate model. https://t.co/iwPaB7bS07 pic.twitter.com/O8qBtV3bxe
— Flavio Lehner (@ClimateFlavors) June 14, 2020
The extreme events of recent years are due to a combination of natural weather patterns and human-caused climate change. The weather pattern giving rise to this heat wave is an incredibly stubborn ridge of high pressure; a dome of heat which extends vertically upward through the atmosphere. The sweltering heat is forecast to remain in place for at least the next week, catapulting temperatures easily into the 90s in eastern Siberia.
We are in a relentless Arctic #heatwave – Siberia is literally on fire right now and it’s set to continue.Temperatures will comfortably exceed + 30 °C within the Arctic Circle over the next 10 days at least. It is a staggering + 20-25 °C warmer than it should be…[THREAD] pic.twitter.com/J9opJLIaIw
— Scott From Scotland (@ScottDuncanWX) June 19, 2020
But this heat wave can not be viewed as an isolated weather pattern. Last summer, the town of Markusvinsa, a village in northern Sweden on the southern edge of the Arctic Circle, hit 94.6°F. Warming and drying of the landscape is leading to unprecedented Arctic fires, with the summer of 2019 being the worst fire season on record.
Due to heat trapping greenhouse gases that result from the burning of fossil fuels and feedback loops, the Arctic is warming at more than two times the average rate of the globe. This phenomenon is known as Arctic Amplification, which is leading to the decline of sea ice, and in some cases snow cover, due to rapidly warming temperatures.
Over the past four decades, sea ice volume has decreased by 50%. The lack of white ice, and corresponding increase in dark ocean and land areas, means less light is reflected and more is absorbed, creating a feedback loop and heating the area disproportionately.
As the average climate continues to heat up, extremes like the current heat wave will become more frequent and intensify. Scientists say there is only one way to dampen the impact of climate change and that is to stop burning fossil fuels.
