Tornadoes, flooding threaten Midwest, Plains

HOUSTON -- The National Weather Service issued a series of tornado watches for areas of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas as the regions brace for another round of severe weather that will probably include flooding along the Mississippi River.

More watches were expected late Wednesday as thunderstorms worsened, according to Mark Wiley, a weather service meteorologist based in Fort Worth.

“It’s just getting fired up now over the Texas Panhandle — it’s exploding as we speak,” Wiley told the Los Angeles Times, with reports of golf-ball-size hail already falling in the area known for extreme weather but not home to any major cities.

“It looks like the most intense storms will be in less populated areas” on Wednesday, Wiley said—places such as Wichita Falls, Texas; Ardmore, Okla.; and Dodge City, Kan.

On Thursday, the storm system is expected to shift east toward larger cities, including Oklahoma City; Tulsa, Okla.; Wichita, Kan.; and Springfield, Mo.; Wiley said.

A tornado watch means conditions are ripe for twisters to form. A tornado warning means a funnel cloud has been sighted.

Wednesday’s storms had yet to threaten the tornado-ravaged Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, where two dozen people died and hundreds were injured when an EF-5 tornado struck May 20.

Michael Scotten, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in nearby Norman, Okla., said the storm was expected to bring winds of 70 mph and perfect conditions for brewing tornadoes.

“What we have is a low-pressure system moving across the Rocky Mountains. It’s continuing to move northeast combined with a lot of low-level moisture and increasing winds, causing the air to be very unstable,” Scotten told The Times. “It’s complicated, but the storms, usually they strengthen during the day, regenerate in the afternoon and evening, then fall apart in the morning,” with tornadoes most likely to form in the afternoon, he said.

He said it was difficult to tell where the heaviest rain would fall, although he said San Antonio, which saw flash flooding last week that killed three people, was unlikely to suffer a similar inundation.

Storm-related flooding was a major concern along the upper Mississippi River, south of the Quad Cities along the Iowa-Illinois border and down to St. Louis, forecasters said. The weather service issued flood warnings late Wednesday in states along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

“There’s a lot of flooding going on there” because of the storm systems, said Steve Buan, service coordination hydrologist with the weather service in Minneapolis. “It’s very volatile systems that are heading to the Midwest, and they’re not exiting very quickly.”

In St. Louis, the Mississippi River had risen 4 feet since Tuesday, reaching 26 feet and approaching the 30-foot flood stage, Buan said. With rain expected to continue through the weekend across the upper Midwest, forecasters predicted the river would rise to about 36 feet, he said, with “the potential for it to go higher yet with repeated rounds of rain in the area.”

The worst flooding could come next week, Buan told The Times, as rain farther north drains into the Mississippi.

“The area’s very saturated” from April storms, he said. “It all feeds into the river, and it has to come through St. Louis. It’s a lot of water. There are definitely people going to be impacted by next week, maybe even this weekend, by the rising Mississippi River. It’s coming.”

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

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