NOAA's Storm Prediction Center issued a Level 4 out of 5 risk of severe thunderstorms Friday afternoon as storms began to organize across the central U.S., putting more than 50 million people in the Midwest and the Plains in the path of dangerous weather. The threat covered parts of western Missouri, southeastern Kansas and northwestern Oklahoma, including northern Oklahoma through Wichita, Kansas, and into parts of western Missouri, including Kansas City.
The forecast called for hail larger than 3 inches in diameter and wind gusts stronger than 85 mph, with the kind of storms that can also produce strong tornadoes. Forecasters said the dangerous severe weather was expected to develop across a corridor stretching from Wisconsin to Texas beginning early Friday afternoon, a 1,500-mile span that put a wide swath of the country on alert at once.
The warning landed after much of the Central U.S. had already been hammered by several rounds of severe weather earlier in the week. Those storms brought destructive flooding to Wisconsin, Texas and Kansas, along with damaging tornadoes across the Midwest. On Monday afternoon, FOX Weather Storm Tracker Corey Gerken captured footage of a tornado near Amboy, Minnesota, a reminder of how quickly the region's weather had already turned violent before Friday's threat was issued.
That is what makes the new nws radar outlook so urgent today: the ground in much of the region was already saturated, the storm track was already active, and the next round carried the potential to intensify quickly. The key question now is not whether severe weather had arrived, but how much of the corridor from Wisconsin to Texas would actually absorb the worst of it before the storms moved on.