Mammoth storm spawns severe weather threat
An immense spring storm 2,200 miles across—easily the season’s biggest to date—is
driving the weather literally from one corner of the U.S. to another. The potent
system threatens a second Friday with severe weather in the Chicago area—including
rotating supercell thunderstorms and possible tornadoes if warming isn’t terribly
inhibited by regular thundery downpours.
A 100-degree north/south U.S. temperatures differential is driving the latest
atmospheric behemoth, which by nightfall Thursday had unleashed crippling snows
on sections of the Plains and Rockies—areas in the 80s only days earlier--while
promoting explosive thunderstorm growth in the Plains. Among the 10 twisters
reported across the Plains by nightfall was a multiple vortex twister—one in which
mini-tornadoes rotate within a larger funnel similar to the one which devastated
Plainfield in August, 1990. That tornado was one of two on the ground
simultaneously near Ralston, Oklahoma. The storms sprung to life as incredibly dry
air featuring desert-like single digit dewpoints, roared at 50 m.p.h. out of the Texas
Panhandle into humid air over the Sooner State.