America’s heartland faces the possibility of heavy rain and flash flooding this week.
Round after round of thunderstorms are expected across Missouri for the next couple of days, many of them happening over the same areas. That means inches of rain could fall in just hours and create flash flooding across eastern and central Missouri, including cities such as St. Louis and Columbia.
“St. Louis, why should we be concerned here?” FOX Weather meteorologist Amy Freeze said. “There has been an example just to the west of St. Louis of what training thunderstorms can do – 6 inches of rain in about 12 hours or so.”
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A storm with a nearly stationary front is chugging through Kansas and stretches into the Show Me State. It’s shoving the hot, humid air that has set records across Texas and Louisiana aloft like a snowplow pushes snow. The result is rounds of explosive thunderstorms that move over the same areas, called training.
“The result is a rather narrow area of persistent thunderstorms with localized areas of (radar) echo training,” wrote the National Weather Service office in St. Louis on Tuesday. “With the high moisture content and multiple storms tracking over similar areas, flash flooding continues to be a threat.”
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Already, 2-4 inches of rain fell overnight in central Missouri. Another round is forecast to set up Tuesday afternoon and evening a bit farther east.
“What’s interesting, though, is that it’s not at 2 (o’clock) in the afternoon when you see these storms,” Freeze said. “Instead, it could be 2 a.m. at night because the low-level jet does not depend on the daytime heating. So that’s something that can catch people off guard, is that you can see these storms at night. That’s when flash flooding could occur, and that’s pretty scary.”
The low-level jet stream pumps moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, which is storm fuel, into the heartland.
According to the FOX Forecast Center, cities from St. Louis to Paducah, Kentucky, could see up to 5 inches of rain locally through Friday. Most areas straddling the entire eastern state line could see up to 2-3 inches.
By Thursday, the heaviest rain will be centered across middle Tennessee from Nashville to Chattanooga and into south central Kentucky, hitting places such as Bowling Green, Kentucky, hard.