Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of Beyond The Forecast!
Spring is less than two weeks away and the warmer days of the new season come with the chance for thunderstorms and severe weather.
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The National Weather Service (NWS) has designated this week as Severe Weather Awareness Week in Virginia so the weather community can prepare the public for all of the threats these thunderstorms can bring.
There are five topics that will be covered, one each day through Friday. Today’s topic covers the difference between a watch and a warning, which can be confusing for some.
A severe thunderstorm watch means that conditions are FAVORABLE for severe thunderstorms, but may not actually be occurring yet. Whereas a warning means that severe thunderstorms are already happening or are about to occur.
Basically a warning is a more immediate threat than a watch, but you should still pay attention and prepare if a watch is issued.
You can substitute the word “tornado” in for “severe thunderstorm” and the difference between a watch and a warning is the same.
Speaking of tornadoes, that’s what we’ll be covering on Tuesday.
It’s important to remember the difference between a funnel cloud and a tornado. Both are rotating columns of air, but a funnel cloud doesn’t reach the ground while a tornado does.
Tornadoes aren’t all that frequent in our corner of the Commonwealth, but we still need to take the threat of them seriously.
Wednesday’s topic will be hail and damaging wind.
We often use household objects like coins, eggs or sporting equipment to measure the size of hail.
Sending your hail-size reports is incredibly helpful during severe weather events so we can determine how strong the storm is as it moves through the area.
When we talk about damaging wind gusts, we mean any storm that has the capability of producing 58+ mph gusts.
The worst of these kind of wind storms? Derechos.
Many of you are familiar with derechos, as we had a notable one cause lots of damage in 2012. We hope we won’t get another for a long time!
Looking ahead to Thursday, you’ll see some coverage on flooding. Flooding is one of the more frequent threats we get from strong thunderstorms in Southwest and Central Virginia.
It’s amazing how little the water has to rise to cause big impacts. It only takes half a foot of water to take down most people. Once the flood waters get up to a foot, cars can be carried away.
Finally on Friday, we’ll be talking about lightning.
The electric bolts from the sky don’t get as much publicity but can be just as dangerous as a tornado or a large hailstone.
The best piece of advice during a lightning storm is to go inside!
In addition to our coverage of Severe Weather Awareness Week in the daily newscasts, we also will be airing a severe weather special on Thursday!
It’s called “When Minutes Matter” and Your Local Weather Authority worked very hard to bring you lots of important weather information. We also had great producers and managers helping us behind the scenes!
If you want to tune in or record the special, it will air in place of 10 News at 5:30 on Thursday.
Switching gears to your forecast, we happen to have a risk for severe weather on this first day of Severe Weather Awareness Week! I’m also tracking the warmth and the wind in today’s forecast article.
You can always get specific forecast details for your zone, whether it’s the Roanoke Valley, Lynchburg area, the New River Valley or elsewhere around Southwest and Central Virginia, anytime at WSLS.com/weather. Know your zone!
In case you missed it, we’re posting great weather and science content on WSLS.com. Here are a few links from the past week to check out:
If you prefer your weather information delivered by social media, you can follow Your Local Weather Authority on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also keep up with me on social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, follow along!
-- Justin McKee