3 people die in a crash of fifty vehicles due to a storm 0:39
(CNN) --
The southern United States is once again under the threat of severe weather this week, with tornadoes, damaging winds and possible hail from Louisiana to North Carolina on Tuesday.
In fact, a tornado watch is in effect until 6 a.m. CT in northeastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas and northwestern Louisiana, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center said.
This Tuesday bad weather continues to threaten some areas of the southern United States.
Severe storms sweeping through the region can produce tornadoes, wind gusts of up to 120 kilometers per hour and golf ball-sized hail, forecasters said.
More than five million people are in the surveillance zone, including the cities of Dallas, Texarkana, which straddles the Texas-Arkansas border, and Shreveport, Louisiana.
Flash flood watches were also issued for the Dallas area overnight, where 2 to 2 inches of rain had already fallen and another 2 inches was possible.
"Be especially careful at night, when it's harder to recognize flood hazards," the NWS Fort Worth office said.
Four people were rescued from fast-moving flood waters in McKinney, Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas on Monday night, authorities said.
The McKinney Fire Department said on Twitter that it carried out three separate water rescues.
No one was injured.
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The severe weather line is the latest in a series of storms that have battered the southern United States for three weeks straight.
The first spawned a deadly EF-3 tornado just outside New Orleans and 25 tornadoes in Texas last month.
Bill Bunting of the Storm Prediction Center told CNN that weather systems can go into repeating cycles.
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"The atmosphere has a fairly chaotic component, but every now and then it gets into patterns where we see this repeatability. We've seen it every season," Bunting said.
"Unfortunately, for this last month, and certainly for the next week, the threat of severe weather is going to be around again, in many of the same areas that have already seen enough severe weather in just the last four weeks."
"Very moist air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico, which has helped storms develop over the past few weeks, is once again what we will see this week," Bunting said.
When to expect the worst conditions
The storm will bring a wave of severe conditions to different parts of the South throughout Tuesday, CNN Meteorologist Robert Shackelford said.
Tornadoes, damaging winds and hail are the main threats.
Here is the expected calendar with the worst weather conditions:
In Jackson, Mississippi, severe thunderstorms will begin around 5 am and continue until about 10:30 am.
Cities from Nashville to Montgomery, Alabama will see severe thunderstorms around 8 a.m. and last until about 1:30 p.m.
In Atlanta, the threat of severe conditions will increase around 1:30 p.m. and last until 5 p.m.
A wide swath of comma-shaped cities from Charlotte and Wilmington, North Carolina, to Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, and looping around Savannah, Georgia, and Panama City, Florida, are expected to see the worst conditions from 6 pm to 10 pm
By Wednesday, a separate system will form, bringing another round of storms south and extending the severe threat for another day.
"A second system develops after the first as an upper trough strongly deepens and plunges through the central Plains and eventually the Deep South," the NWS Atlanta office said.
For this Thursday, the threat diminishes, since the storms move away from the east coast.
Storms will move south, but rain will continue across much of the East Coast.
Anywhere from Florida to New England will see showers, so both Wednesday and Thursday we could see some travel delays from some major airports as this system moves on.
CNN's Jennifer Gray, Gene Norman and Chris Boyette contributed to this report.
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