Severe weather is expected to hit parts of the east tomorrow, with the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) warning of an increased risk of tornadic thunderstorms in Tuesday’s severe weather outbreak, particularly in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
According to the SPC, large-amplitude ridging will develop in the western United States on Tuesday, with gradual troughing continuing in the east. Multiple short-wave impulses are expected to rotate through the eastern US trough, with a belt of enhanced northwesterly flow crossing the Midwest and into the Ohio Valley. During the period, a cold front will shift south and east, forming a surface low over southern Ontario and Quebec in Canada. A pre-frontal surface trough will also be present across western/central New York and the Mid-Atlantic region, setting the stage for the development of numerous thunderstorms.
Thunderstorms are expected to intensify along the prefrontal trough from western/central New York to the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic late Tuesday morning and afternoon. Though there is a possibility of early morning cloud cover, it appears that enough heating/moistening will occur for at least moderate instability to develop across the region by the afternoon.
“It appears widely scattered thunderstorm activity with several clusters/embedded supercells will be ongoing by the afternoon,” warns the SPC. “The highest confidence in transient embedded supercell modes would be closer to the surface low and near the front in western New York and eastern Pennsylvania. ” There is a possibility of damaging wind, large hail, and even a couple of tornadoes.”
In general, forecast guidance indicates that the most serious threat from these storms will be damaging to destructive winds, with the best signal for damaging winds coming from the Mid-Atlantic, where numerous damaging clusters may form.
Tornadoes are also a threat from these storms, with a particularly high risk in northeastern Kentucky, southeastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, all of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, much of Pennsylvania, and portions of New York and Connecticut. This enhanced tornado threat zone includes the metro regions of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.
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