Tens of millions of people across the central and southern U.S. will need to stay weather-alert from Friday into Saturday, as an unusually powerful storm system wraps up across the Central Plains and races into the Midwest. A sprawling outbreak of severe weather, including strong tornadoes, is expected on both days, and extreme wildfires could race across the prairies of Texas and Oklahoma on Friday.
Even by the usual wild-weather standards of March, this event could be historic. A surface low intensifying across the Central Plains on Friday is predicted to carve out a central pressure near or below 975 millibars (hPa). This would put it among the strongest lows ever observed in this area.
As of early Friday, the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center (SPC) had issued “moderate risk” outlooks (level 4 out of 5) for both Friday and Saturday, surrounded by broader level 2 and 3 areas (“slight” and “enhanced” risk, see Fig. 1). Strong tornadoes, huge hail, and destructive thunderstorm wind gusts are possible on both days, especially in the moderate-risk areas. The tornado threat is especially serious on Saturday across the South; as the SPC put it, “multiple long-track high-end tornadoes will be possible.”
A fast-evolving setup for severe weather
Two distinct, intense cores of upper-level energy within a broader upper low will rip across the U.S. heartland. The first, more compact impulse (a short wave trough) will drive the intense surface low from Kansas to Minnesota on Friday, with a cold front attached to the low pushing even further east toward the mid-Mississippi Valley by Friday night.
Along and ahead of the front, just enough Gulf moisture is expected to stream north to allow for thunderstorm development by Friday afternoon. These scattered storms are expected to quickly consolidate into one or more squall-line segments that could race eastward at speeds of 50 mph or more. A few supercell thunderstorms are possible toward the southern end of the risk area, especially toward evening.
The main threats from the severe storms – which could persist after dark as they move from eastern Missouri and Arkansas into western Illinois into western Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi – will be destructive wind gusts of 70 to 95 mph and tornadoes. Some of the twisters within the squall line could be short-lived but still potentially strong and damaging (and difficult to warn for, especially at night and with rapid storm motion). Any supercells from this line could spawn strong tornadoes and hail as large as baseballs.
Saturday’s severe weather will have a different flavor, as the entire upper low moves eastward from the Southern Plains into the South. Ample moisture will have spread northward across the region by that point, so clusters of storms could develop and dump torrential rain. Especially in the moderate risk area focused on Mississippi and Alabama, the overall pattern looks favorable for multiple long-lived, rotating supercell thunderstorms – the type that tend to produce the most intense and longest-lived tornadoes.
Leftover storms and clouds from Friday night will have a big influence on how Saturday’s severe weather develops, including where frontal zones end up.
A grim anniversary is accentuated by Friday’s storm threat
Next Tuesday, March 18, happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Tri-State Tornado, which still holds the record as the single deadliest and longest-lived U.S. tornado on record. Rolling at highway speeds from southeast Missouri to southern Indiana (including some of the same areas at risk on Friday), the twister took at least 695 lives.
Given the exceptional nature of the Tri-State Tornado compared to any others on record, researchers have long wondered whether it might have been more than one twister. Although the Tri-State Tornado was long considered to have a 219-mile path, a subsequent analysis from 2013 identified many gaps in the damage path. That study concluded that a single tornado might have covered at least 174 miles of the path. The best analog from recent years is probably the Quad-State Supercell from the catastrophic outbreak of December 10, 2021; this long-lived supercell spawned an EF4 tornado that covered 165.7 miles, inflicting severe damage across western Kentucky. Another supercell just to the southeast produced an EF3 twister with a 122.7-mile path across parts of western Tennessee and central Kentucky.
In its superb multimedia story map on the Tri-State Tornado, the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky, offered these reflections:
Many years ago, we posed the questions: If the Tri-State Tornado was one massive storm, then why hasn’t such a storm been documented in the decades proceeding its occurrence? Could it be that the 1925 tornado was a rare event—occurring only once in several hundred years? Did it actually result from a cyclical supercell? Or could it be that we lack enough information to come to a definitive conclusion at this time? Despite all the uncertainties surrounding the 1925 Tri-State Tornado, one thing is for certain—a storm like it will happen again. The only question is: when and where?
Among the still-standing records set in the Tri-State Tornado, as noted by NWS/Paducah:
- 234 deaths in Murphysboro—a record for a single community from such a disaster
- 33 deaths at the De Soto school—a record for such a storm (only bombings and gas explosions have taken higher school tolls)
An unusually expansive fire-weather zone for Friday
By far the nation’s biggest wildfire of 2024, and the largest in modern Texas history, was the Smokehouse Creek Fire. It tore across more than a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, killing 2 people and causing some $1 billion in damage. The bulk of the fire coverage and damage occurred within a mere 24 hours from the afternoon of February 26, as high winds drove the fire across a parched landscape.
Fire-friendly weather will again be at top-end levels across the Southern Plains on Friday, but this time further east, over a more heavily populated area (see Fig. 3 above). As of early Friday, the Storm Prediction Center had placed an “extremely critical” area (level 3 of 3) across much of Oklahoma (including Oklahoma City and Tulsa) and parts of North Texas, edging close to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
By late Friday morning, Lubbock, Texas, had already experienced winds gusting to 70 mph—the strongest on record f0r any spring day in data going back 80 years.
SPC warned early Friday that the combination of “extremely strong winds, critically low [relative humidity], and receptive fuels across a large swath of the Southern Plains is culminating in an anomalously high-end fire weather threat.”
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
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