Severe Threat Thursday

A front will arrive in our area tomorrow evening and bring us a good chance for thunderstorms. Thunderstorms will start popping west of I-95 between 5 and 8 PM. Scattered thunderstorms will then overspread central Virginia from 8 PM to 4 AM.


I think the computer forecasts are keeping our high temperatures too low. With partly cloudy skies for the first half of the day, we should easily climb into the upper 80s. That means our atmosphere will be more unstable than what is currently depicted by the computers.

Jet stream winds will be strong, so there will be plenty of speed shear. Winds will be southwesterly from the ground all the way into the upper atmosphere. This means that damaging winds will be the primary threat tomorrow. An isolated short-lived tornado could develop within the strongest storms, however, once the storms form into a squall line, the threat for tornadoes will decrease.