High Winds In Much Of Nation As Next Storm Raises Cain

All those browns you see on today's National Weather 
Service map extending from California to Wisconsin
are high wind warnings, watches and advisories.
As you can see a huge portion of the nation is
in for trouble with strong winds the next couple of days. 

 As if the nation needs more problems with bad weather and high winds, then next storm to rip across the United States is causing, and will cause a huge problem with strong winds through a huge chunk of the nation.  

This time, tornadoes aren't nearly as much of a threat. But damaging winds, dangerous wildfires in the Plains, flooding in California, and winter weather in some areas are all issues with this system.  

And a couple tornadoes aren't out of the question. But at least we won't have anything like we saw Friday with those harrowing twisters that killed dozens of people. 

I'm impressed by the huge area of the nation that is  under high wind warnings, watches and advisories. The strong wind zone extends from much of California, through most of the central and southern Rockies, and much of the Plains states, from the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming, all the way to Wisconsin. This wind zone extends from Texas in the south to the Dakotas in the north. 

Probably the scariest place to watch during this episode is the area from northern Texas, through western Oklahoma and much of Kansas, and the High Plains of eastern Colorado and New Mexico.

It's been exceptionally dry in these areas.  This storm is expected to cause wind gusts in this zone today and tomorrow as high as 75 mph, with relative humidities falling to around 10 percent, which is ridiculously dry.  There have already been some damaging rangeland fires in these areas. 

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center had issued a rare extreme fire risk zone for central and western Kansas and some surrounding areas for later today and tomorrow.  There will also be vast amounts of blowing dust in this mix. The dust storms can cause sudden drops in visibility, leading to the risk of pileups on highways in the region. 

This is a weird one.

Adding to the weirdness this storm will pick up a little bit of moisture, and lots of warmth as it heads east.  There's a risk of severe thunderstorms tomorrow in Iowa and southern Minnesota. There could even be a couple of tornadoes 

While it won't be anything like Kentucky experienced, this storm threat is really odd for this time of year for places so far north.  Blizzards are usually the risk in December in this region. 

Elsewhere, this storm is already hitting California, with heavy rain and torrential snow in the mountains. This is good and bad news for them. Good news, because drought-stricken California needs the rain.  But also a little bad news because the rain came down heavily enough to cause quite a bit of flooding in and near the San Francisco Bay Area, and could cause flooding further south today and tomorrow.

Travel through the Sierra Nevada is pretty much impossible with forecasts of several feet of snow, with snow coming down sometimes at a rate of four inches per hour.

VERMONT EFFECTS

Once again, we here in the Green Mountain State will avoid the worst of this storm, but we'll see our share of effects.  It'll be essentially a repeat of the storm we had Saturday. 

Wednesday night, the storm's warm front will approach, giving us a bout of mixed precipitation again.  It'll probably be mostly rain in the Champlain Valley, but other parts of the state can expect slick roads overnight Wednesday night into Thursday.

Then it will warm up dramatically during the day Thursday.  Record highs on Thursday are for some reason a bit lower than on many other days this time of year for some reason.  That means we have a shot at some broken record highs. For instance,  Burlington has a good shot at reaching 54 degrees, the record for the date.

Once again, we'll also have quite a bit of wind, though probably not as bad as on Saturday night. On Saturday, there was quite a bit of wind damage in northern New York State from the wind. Those winds caused one death when a tree ranch fell on him in Mooers, New York. There were also some lesser issues in Vermont from Saturday's gusts.