Live updates: Significant severe weather outbreak to hammer the Heartland with dangerous tornadoes
Track the latest updates as a significant severe weather outbreak targets the Heartland with the threat of dangerous tornadoes, destructive wind gusts, and large hail through Friday. Our FOX Forecast Center is monitoring high-risk areas across the Plains and Midwest to keep you ahead of these life-threatening storms with real-time radar and expert analysis.
- Primary threats: A dangerous multi-day severe weather outbreak is underway, bringing the risk of strong tornadoes (EF-2 or higher), destructive wind gusts over 70 mph, and huge hail larger than golf balls.
- Today’s threat: Severe storms are expected to erupt this afternoon across the Central and Southern Plains. The highest risk corridor stretches from Lubbock and Oklahoma City up through Wichita, Kansas, and Omaha, Nebraska.
- Friday outbreak: FOX Weather forecasters warn Friday could be the most significant day of the event. A Level 3 out of 5 risk is in place for a massive area from Texas to the Upper Midwest, including major hubs like Dallas, St. Louis, and Chicago.
- Timing: Storms are expected to fire off along a dryline late each afternoon (between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. local time), transitioning into dangerous overnight clusters that could impact the Oklahoma City and Kansas City metro areas after dark.
- Flash flood risk: In addition to the tornado threat, heavy rain could trigger flash flooding from Northeast Texas through the Mid-Mississippi Valley, with 1–3 inches of rain possible in a short window.
FlightAware MiseryMap showing flight disruptions across the United States.
Travelers across the country are facing a turbulent day at the airport as rain and storms stretching from the Northeast to Texas trigger significant air traffic disruptions.
The FAA has warned of potential ground stops and arrival delays for major hubs including JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia as rain moves through these critical flight corridors.
If you are heading to the airport today, be sure to check your flight status early and often, as these weather-related delays are expected to ripple through flight schedules nationwide well into the evening.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is drying out this morning after a relentless deluge on Wednesday triggered widespread flash flooding and several building failures.
Emergency crews responded to multiple reports of roof collapses under the weight of the water, while several major thoroughfares were left impassable as rain totals quickly overwhelmed North Texas drainage systems.
Watch
What it means: This type of statement is issued when dangerous weather is forecast to occur and widespread impacts to life and property are expected. It means forecasters believe conditions are right for severe weather to happen.
You can think of this as the National Weather Service’s way of saying, "Be on the lookout for severe weather."
What you should do: Prepare for the type of severe weather that is indicated in the watch. This means reviewing your safety plans so that you are ready to take action if a warning is issued.
Example: If a Tornado Watch is issued for your area, it means forecasters believe tornadoes are possible with any storms that develop.
You should review your tornado safety plan, which means knowing how to get to the lowest level of the building you are in and how to locate an interior room with no windows on that floor.
Watches and Warnings are issued to alert Americans to the threat of severe weather.
Warning
What it means: This type of statement is issued when severe weather is occurring and poses an immediate danger to life and property.
What you should do: Take action, meaning you should immediately execute your safety plan for the type of severe weather that is indicated in the warning.
Example: If a Tornado Warning is issued for your area, it means meteorologists have detected a possible tornado on radar or a trained storm spotter has reported seeing a tornado.
You should immediately go to your storm shelter. If you don’t have a storm shelter, get to the lowest level of the building you are in and head to an interior room with no windows. The goal is to put as many walls between you and the tornado as possible. Make sure to cover your head.
If you’ve looked at a severe weather map this week and felt like you needed a PhD to decode it, you aren’t alone.
The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) recently rolled out a major update to its maps by introducing Conditional Intensity Groups (CIGs). For years, we relied on simple 'hatched areas' to show where intense storms might happen, but the new CIG system adds three specific tiers of intensity.
Storm Prediction Center website showing the tornado Conditional Intensity Group for Friday.
The goal is to separate probability (how likely a storm is to hit your house) from intensity (how bad that storm will be if it actually forms).
While this is a win for meteorologists, it’s creating a map fatigue for many everyday Americans who just want to know if they need to hide in the basement or if it's safe to run to the grocery store.
The challenge for us in the weather community is that these new layers—CIG1, CIG2, and CIG3—require us to communicate three different things at once: the overall risk category (1-5), the specific probability of a hazard, and now the "ceiling" of how violent a storm could become.
It’s a lot to digest when you're already worried about a tornado sirens going off.
A CIG1 might mean a threat of strong EF2 tornadoes, while a CIG3 is reserved for historically violent, once-in-a-decade setups.
Balancing this data without causing warning fatigue or confusion is the ultimate hurdle.
At FOX Weather, our job is to strip away the jargon and keep the message simple: regardless of the tier, if you’re in the threat zone, you need to have a plan.
Radar shows a cluster of thunderstorms pounding Oklahoma with intense rain this morning.
A slow-moving cluster of storms is currently drenching Southeast Oklahoma, and it’s showing signs of back-building—a term meteorologists use when new storm cells continuously form on the backside of the main group.
Think of it like a train where new cars are constantly being added to the back while the front stays over the same tracks; this leads to training, where heavy rain falls over the exact same neighborhoods for hours.
Because these storms are tapping into a low-level jet (a fast-moving stream of moisture-rich air) and a stationary front, they have a constant fuel source. This is leading to incredibly high rain rates of up to 2 inches per hour, which is more than enough to overwhelm drainage systems and cause rapid flooding.
The big concern through mid-morning will be urban flash flooding, especially in cities across Pittsburg and Latimer counties. Even though the overall energy in the atmosphere is only modest, the way these storms are anchoring themselves means an additional 2 to 4 inches of rain could fall in a very short window.
The FOX Forecast Center says these storms will persist into the late morning and eventually push into Western Arkansas.
If you are driving in these areas, remember that most flash flood fatalities occur in vehicles—if you encounter a flooded roadway, "Turn Around, Don't Drown," as the road beneath the water may already be washed away.
If you’ve been watching the radar this morning, things might look relatively quiet across the Plains, but don't let this fool you. FOX Weather Meteorologists are keeping a close eye on an invisible battle happening in the sky today—a phenomenon we call "the cap."
Think of the cap (or capping inversion) like a literal lid on a pot of boiling water. Down at the surface, we have instability building—that’s the warm, moist air acting as the fuel.
Normally, that warm air wants to rise, cool, and form massive clouds. However, today there is a layer of even warmer air sitting just a few thousand feet up. Since warm air is lighter than cool air, that lid traps the moisture at the surface, preventing storms from firing early in the day.
The breaking point
For severe storms to happen, that lid has to break. According to the latest computer model data, afternoon heating across the Texas Panhandle and Western Oklahoma should be just strong enough to poke holes in the cap by late today.
When the cap finally breaks, it’s often explosive. All that trapped energy is released at once, leading to storms that go from zero to sixty in minutes. This is why we are concerned about supercells—those long-lived, rotating thunderstorms—developing rapidly between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m..
The ingredients for trouble
Once those storms break through the cap, they’ll have everything they need to become dangerous:
- Steep lapse rates: This is a fancy way of saying the temperature drops very quickly as you go higher in the sky. This acts like a vacuum, sucking the air upward at incredible speeds.
- Veering winds: As you move from the ground up to the jet stream, the winds are changing direction (turning like a corkscrew). This is the shear that gives storms their rotation, increasing the risk for tornadoes and very large hail.
Exclusive FOX Weather Model showing thunderstorms erupting across Oklahoma and Texas this evening.
What to watch later today
As we head into the evening, these individual supercell storms will likely clump together into a bowing structure.
Imagine a line of storms curving outward like a literal archer’s bow; this is a signal that the storm is breathing out very powerful, destructive straight-line winds.
While the cap might keep things quiet for most of the day, it’s essentially just wound the spring tighter for the evening.
Keep your FOX Weather app alerts turned on—once the lid pops, things will move fast.
A Level 3 of 5 severe storm threat area spans Oklahoma and Texas for the threat of dangerous storms later today.
A volatile atmospheric setup is taking shape today across the Central and Southern Plains as a potent low-pressure system pulls a surge of warm, unstable air northward from the Gulf of America.
This moisture is set to clash with an advancing dryline, sparking a severe weather threat that spans a broad corridor from Lubbock, Texas, through Oklahoma City, and up into Wichita and Omaha.
The FOX Forecast Center is particularly concerned with late-afternoon supercell development, as these discrete storms will have the potential to produce very large hail, damaging wind gusts over 70 mph, and a few tornadoes.
As the evening progresses, these individual storms are expected to congeal into a dangerous line or cluster of storms, shifting the primary threat toward destructive straight-line winds as they move into the Mid-Mississippi Valley.
Because many of these storms will persist after sunset, it is critical for residents in the path of the system to have multiple ways to receive warnings overnight.
This activity is only the prelude to an even more significant severe weather outbreak forecast for Friday, making today an essential time for those in the Heartland to finalize their emergency plans.
Radar showing thunderstorms hammering parts of the Ohio Valley, Ozarks, and Oklahoma this morning.
The morning has gotten off to a soggy start as a complex of rain and thunderstorms tracks across the Ozarks and into the Ohio Valley, bringing downpours to cities like Evansville, Indiana, McAlester, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky.
These storms are tapping into an unseasonably moist air mass—boasting moisture levels nearly three times the March norm—which increases the risk of localized flash flooding in areas already saturated from yesterday’s rain.
While this morning activity is largely sub-severe, it is helping to set the stage for a much more volatile environment later today as the primary storm system reloads over the Plains.
The severe weather threat today is part of a multi-day event that began yesterday with flooding and storm damage across the South and Ohio Valley.
You can catch up on the initial round of storms, including the significant flash flooding in Dallas, in yesterday’s live coverage here.
Live Coverage begins here