The latest National Lightning Safety Council’s lightning-related death report shows two people lost their lives as a result of lightning over the weekend.
weather center in atlanta for this. this weather looks alarming, pedram. what can you tell us? as you ve noted, we ve seen 20 plus reports of tornado. the weather we re forecasting has begun to ramp up across the southern area of mississippi into western areas of alabama. still see some activities and tornadoes. favorable here for tornadoes. it s occurring across areas of montgomery, alabama. 21 reports and the latest observations here across the southern southeastern u.s. we expect the tornado watches to expire at 7 p a.m. central time. the system has produced large hail. forecasts for significant hail. two inches in dye a.m. meter. golf bam size hail and want to show you the intensity of the storms here. that is looking at the lightning data. upwards of 66,000 lightning
the vast majority stretching over 220 plus. severe wind gust reports. some of these the strongest hurricane wind gusts across areas of mississippi, kentucky, the state of tennessee as well. very strong wind gusts in praise with the storms. look at the lightning data. able to tabulate 106,000 lightning strikes and it speaks to the height of this. the weekend and it moves away off the eastern 1/3 of the u.s. notice quite a bit of rainfall observed here. flooding widespread whether it s arkansas, wisconsin, as far north as iowa. we ve seen as much as 5 plus inches come down. we ve talked about the tornadoes. the preliminary number puts us at 292. 80 is the beginning of march. almost matching what we expect in the entire month as we approach peak season. laura? pedram we know you are
winds. significant amount of wind. widespread coverage of severe wind gusts that at times were gusting to over 16, even 70 plus miles per hour pushing up to hurricane force across the state of mississippi and really the intensity, the ferocity of these storms as impressive as it gets. in fact, look at the lightning data. in a 12-hour span, 106,031 lightning strikes. frontal boundary from louisiana all the way to ohio. that span about 830 miles across and it speaks to the incredible magnitude of the storm system. notice some of these like the tornadoes spotted across portions of louisville, kentucky, into the evening hours. any time you look at these, we talked about the tornadoes in recent weeks. we had an incredible and historic month of march. the month of march brings 180 tornadoes. this has it at 292 tornadoes, an
some of your comments earlier, talking about what you do know about the storm that this plane went through or tried to go around simply because of the lightning strikes reported there. what do they tell kpups. yeah what we do know is that there was a significant number of lightning strikes in and around the path of the airasia flight. and, you know one of the difficult things in any weather scenario is having enough data to really know what s going on and being able to determine whether you re going to fly into danger or not. and in that area of the world, there s just not a lot of data. sop, you know, we ve seen a lot of the satellite imagery and it s interesting and certainly shows a pretty massive set of thunderstorms that was approaching the area but it doesn t give you very much precise information. and that s really the beauty of the lightning data it really pinpoints where the most dangerous parts of thunderstorms are. and our network definitely indicated that there was some s