folks well. i m sure they ll get through this. holy toledo. thank you. thank you, neil. neil: thank you. let s get a read on this. joe bastardi. we ve had more than 500 tornados this year. they can be all sizes. what is going on? we ve had a persistent pattern of cold air in the western and northern united states and as the heat in the southeast. it s a classic setup. you could see it two or three weeks ago this pattern setting up. may is the tornado month. it s like september and the hurricane season. the reason that happens is the mid and upper levels of the atmosphere are still cold enough that you get the clashes going on. generally when mays are warm.
effort here. and we do not yet know the full extent of the damage. now that we have first light, crews should expect to find out more about it throughout the day. search and rescue teams are going door to door to find out if there were any people trapped in their homes. we did get reports of rescue teams having to go in and get some of those people, jeff. back to you. gabe gutierrez, thank you for that report. bill karins we had 13 straight days of tornadoes. a stretch for people living in the affected region. may is typically our most active tornado month, but we had day after day after day. we had at least eight to ten tornado reports for the longest stretch we ve ever seen. there are unusual aspects of this. when you combine this, the tornadoes with all the rare flooding and flash flooding problems we have. this is a multi-billion dollar disaster that we re in the middle of and not over yet. yes. we can even add up at this point how many houses have been lost
mica it s tornado month. we caught one up close in west texas. it almost looked like a spacecraft land in there. that s a rotating wall cloud. in the middle is the actual funnel cloud. when it hits the ground the dust starts to fly, it s classified as a tornado. thankfully that one looks impressive. didn t do any damage at all. we have severe weather threat in the cards today through the end of the week this weekend on saturday, a possibility of an outbreak saturday afternoon. let s start with the weather map and show you where it s raining and hard this morning. it was in areas around dallas and oklahoma city. as we go throughout the afternoon, 3 million people at severe storms. that s the areas i m concerned with the most for potential severe weather and tornadoes. this weekend, it will be in the same exact space. we are watching morning joe. we ll be right back. seaworld we d like you to know. we don t collect killer whales from the wild. and haven t for 35 years. with the hight
factor. what happens for today. we go into yesterday. look at this. may 31st, the line of storms, tonights across oklahoma soared into the triple digits. that fueled the fire that eventually spawned some of the tornadoes, that flow coming in from the gulf of mexico, that cooler air coming in behind it. you get some low level rotation and this is what happened. this just escalated. the activity that we saw. the crews now are saying that el reno, also the union city tornadoes, they are investigating it and ef4 3 or 4. and we saw that moore on may 20th just 11, 12 days ago now, that was an ef5, just to give you some idea of how intense these are. well, may is the key tornado month. june falls right behind with only minimally less tornado activity. and yesterday we had 269 severe weather reports. of those, 23 were tornadoes.
around. they re getting rid of the snow. six flags, one of the big amusement parks there on the south side of st. louis, winter wonderland with that foot of snow. they re opening up tomorrow! they are going to clear it all out and hopefully melt it away today, too, but you know, this is a big holiday, a lot of kids will be off from school this weekend, so they re trying to get things prepped and ready. good luck with that. we re dealing with another cold morning in the deep south. what else is new, just like yesterday, but it s actually not quite as bad. we re in the low 30s, but at least we re not below freezing. so, very cold in the southern half of the country, but like yesterday, with the sunshine, you ll warm it up. it s not that frigid out there. 28 in minneapolis, not really that cold in new england, so it s chilly, but it s not freezing. we re actually close to normal for this time of year. the one good thing i ve been pointing out about this march is very can t had a lot of to