Damaging Winds Possible Sunday

This is starting to feel like the transition from winter to spring, with strong storms moving in and the battle of cold air and warm. When we go from fall to winter, you see these storms that bring high winds and they end with some backside snow. But when we go from winter to spring, you'll see the possibility of storms. While I don't anticipate any severe storms to make it as far north as Central Ohio, we're seeing the first Moderate Risk area this year, showing up across the southeastern US:

Down there they'll most likely see the first tornado outbreak of the year.

Further north we'll have the strong wind dynamics, but without the instability. With the front passing through our area in the early morning hours tomorrow we have almost zero juice in the atmosphere to spark anything. Storms may be possible as nearby as northern Kentucky, but I don't anticipate anything tornadic.

Instead, expect a decent amount of mixing down to the surface as the front moves through early tomorrow morning and then throughout the day tomorrow. There's a strong pressure gradient between the deepening Great Lakes low and a building high coming out of the Rockies. That sets us up for our high wind event.

High Wind Watches stretch from Illinois to New England:

This is definitely a power and dynamic system. This map is colorful, with Blizzard Warnings in the Plains, Flood Watches across the South and our High Wind Watch. It'll be interesting to see if we transition to a High Wind Warning or just a Wind Advisory. Models have slowly pulled back on the severity of the wind gusts, but not only do I think it's the high winds but the duration that'll cause problems for us.

Here's just a snapshot of the NAM from 9am tomorrow morning, wind gusts close to 50mph across the northern part of the state:

I think we could go 24 straight hours with gusts over 40mph, with multiple instances throughout the day Sunday with gusts over 50mph. I think we're at a pretty high risk for power outages here in Central Ohio considering how saturated our ground is. Just this morning I noticed we have trees down from some 30mph gusts we saw earlier this week. Imagine what 50mph will do?

On top of the winds, the temps will drop from the 50s to the 20s from Sunday morning to Monday morning. Expect a couple flurries to fly late in the day Sunday as insult to injury.

I'll be tweeting as much as I can tomorrow, keeping up with what the storm is doing.