A tornado outbreak is possible in New Jersey, Delaware, and portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont and Massachussetts tomorrow, including the metro areas around Philadelphia and New York City. While not everyone in this area will see a tornado, severe thunderstorms are possible and some could create tornadoes. According to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC), the area most at risk of seeing any tornado in the United States is in this area which stretches from New York and Vermont south into Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey.
According to the SPC, convection today that’s firing up around the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley will head east, entering the region in the Mid Atlantic to New York state during the morning hours. “In the wake of this morning activity, most guidance shows at least modest destabilization occurring ahead of a weak front that should advance slowly eastward through the day,” says the SPC in their latest Convective Outlook. The SPC says that additional thunderstorms should develop by Friday afternoon along and ahead of this front in a weakly to moderately unstable environment. Even though mid-level winds do not appear overly strong, enough flow and related effective bulk shear should be present for modest updraft organization and . Isolated damaging winds and hail may occur with the strongest convection. Additionally, isolated tornadoes are possible in this region as just the right atmospheric ingredients come together to turn some cells violent.
This region has been hit frequently with Tornado Warnings and actual tornadoes. On Sunday, severe weather triggered multiple tornado warnings and forced the closure of a Six Flags park in central New Jersey. Earlier in the year, in April, another tornado outbreak in the region turned deadly with multiple tornadoes spotted; a total of 9 tornadoes were confirmed from the April 1 tornado outbreak alone. In February, New Jersey saw both a confirmed tornado and a confirmed water spout in what was an unusual time of year for such severe weather.
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