ST. LOUIS – The stormy weather continues this Wednesday.
A Level 2 (out of 5) risk for severe storms exists this afternoon and evening. Rainfall will diminish in the morning with some breaks in the clouds possible by midday into early afternoon.
This will help fuel isolated to scattered storms from mid-afternoon into this evening.
The set-up is a bit messy with a number of old weather boundaries floating around, but a new push of energy coming up from the southwest should trigger at least isolated storms again sometime after 3 p.m. and lasting through this evening.
There is a poorly organized warm front that will also try and push north ahead of the Oklahoma storm complex through this afternoon into this evening. The combination of a bit of sunshine, the approaching energy from Oklahoma and the poorly organized front mixed with countless outflow boundaries from the rain and storms of the past few days leaves us with a pretty chaotic pattern—tough to pin down specific trends for the day and where/if severe storms will be able to develop.
The problem is that the right alignment of boundaries could lead to an isolated strong to severe storm with some rotation, not unlike what we saw happen yesterday near Potosi.
The messy nature of the triggers makes pinning down exact times almost impossible. In general, we are looking in the 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. window.
Most storms will not be severe, but the set-up could support some isolated wind gusts of 50-60 mph, isolated hail of nickel to quarter-sized, and like Tuesday, a couple of short duration lower end tornadoes in the EF0-EF1 range.
We continue to inch up the scale towards the wettest April on record with a little more than 12 hours to go, we may break that record before the day is done!
