By Dennis Romero —
NBC News
Severe weather that killed at least 32 people from the South to the Midwest over the weekend is gone, but another round of thunderstorms was targeting much the same area Tuesday.
Federal forecasters said Monday that a thunderous front of wind, lightning, hail and rain, with possible tornadoes, will sweep through the eastern third of the country Tuesday afternoon and overnight into Wednesday.
Much like the tornado-producing front that struck Friday night and Saturday morning, it was expected to form in a diagonal line from Illinois to eastern Texas and move south and east, bringing a Unsettled weather which is not unusual for the area at this time of year.
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However, there is an added possibility of tornadoes as strong as EF-2, with sustained winds of 111 mph, as cold northern air and warm, relatively humid air from the Gulf of Mexico collide explosively, according to meteorologists.
If strong aloft winds reverse and subside and supercells and then mesocyclones produce thunderous, spinning, vertical storms, the system will have created fertile conditions for tornadoes, they added.
“If they form,” National Weather Service meteorologist Melissa Byrd said of thunderstorms, “they have the potential to cause very strong, large-scale tornadoes.”
An estimated 35 million people will be in the front's path, according to NBC News' weather unit.
And as it moves east into Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and other states in its path, 58 million could be affected.
The worst weather is likely to materialize along a vertical line from Des Moines, Iowa, to Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Weather Service said.
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Springfield, Missouri, will join Iowa's Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Waterloo and Iowa City in being targeted by the worst of the front, which the weather service described as having a moderate risk of severe storms.
"Strong tornadoes and particularly damaging winds are expected," the weather service said in an outlook report Monday.
"There will be potential for both evening and nighttime in several regions, including the risk of dangerous nighttime tornadoes."
Louis, where thunderstorms and even a few tornadoes are not unusual during the month of May.
But this time the region is being hit.
“We can possibly see two rounds of severe weather — in the afternoon and into tomorrow night,” said Byrd, based at the weather service office in nearby St. Charles.
To the north and west of that storm activity, in Wyoming, Dakota and Minnesota, the same front was expected to produce blizzard conditions and the possibility of record amounts of snow — up to 2 feet in some places — by April, according to the service. weather forecaster and NBC News weather unit.
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Experts say the continental US and the South in particular are unfortunate enough to be where cold fronts from Canada and storms from the Pacific move south and east and collide with tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico, creating an annual hotbed of storms.
But
climate change could be making the extremes worse,
leading to colder cold fronts, stronger tornadoes and bigger hail in spring, as well as longer, hotter spells in summer, they have said.
In mid-March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Spring Forecast called for moderate to severe flooding from Minneapolis to St. Louis, while drought continued across the northern and central Plains.
“Climate change is causing both wet and dry extremes
,” said Rick Spinrad, NOAA administrator.
