Strong Storms Possible in the Northeast & Southeast

20 Mar 2020, 10:00 am

Perhaps the famous saying “April showers bring May flowers” should be bumped up a month to say “March showers bring April flowers”.

A bout of heavy rain and strong-to-severe thunderstorms are set to accompany a surge of near-record setting warmth in the East today (Friday). That warmth, coupled with a powerful cold front arriving from the west, will create the instability needed to generate strong-to-severe thunderstorms on Friday for a big chunk of the Northeast.

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) issued a marginal risk for severe weather for Friday, or a level one risk on a 0-to-5 scale in terms of the possibility for severe storms. Areas in the Lower Mississippi Valley have a marginal severe weather risk.

Damaging winds are expected to be the primary threat with the storms. The main threat zone is expected to stretch from interior parts of New England west through most of New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Most of the storms are expected to impact the region on Friday afternoon and into the early evening, during the warmest portions of the day. Winds could gust in excess of 60 miles-per-hour (mph), leading to the possibility of downed trees and power lines.

Stay with WeatherNation for the latest on Friday’s rain and storms.

About the author

Chris Bianchi

Chris doesn't remember a time when that he didn't love the weather. When he was five years old, he wrote his first words, "Partly cloudy", in Ms. Benn's kindergarten class. According to Chris, it's been a love affair ever since, from teaching himself how to read forecast models at age 12, to landing at WeatherNation. Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, he started to go after his lifelong drea... Load Morem of becoming a meteorologist by predicting whether or not there would be snow days - turning him into Greenwich High School's "defacto weatherman". He turned that snow day-predicting website into a front page story a local newspaper, which in turn earned him a look at WABC-TV in New York, where Chris did the weather live on-air at the age of 16. He attended Boston University, where he continued being a "weather nerd", performing weather updates on the campus radio and TV stations, and doing the daily forecasts for the student newspaper. Following his studies at BU, Chris worked at Mile High Sports and ESPN Denver for four years while pursuing his certification in Broadcast Meteorology from Mississippi State University. Chris is a huge sports fan, rooting for the Rockies, Nuggets, Broncos, Avalanche and UConn. He frequently find links between sports and weather, including an investigative analysis he did in 2013, finding trends between Peyton Manning's play and game time temperature (he doesn't like the cold). Chris also enjoys running, playing any sport, socializing and periodically overeating at all-you-can-eat buffets.