Severe storms threaten large hail, damaging wind for Friday evening in Nebraska

Don’t let the beginning of the day fool you. It’ll be a relatively calm and pleasant start to the day before severe storms are expected across Nebraska Friday evening into the night.

Storms later today are expected to be fast movers. Scattered storms will start to pop after about 4 p.m. around north-central and northeast Nebraska. They are expected to move southeast in time and approach the Tri-Cities after about 6-7 p.m. and Lincoln closer to 8-9 p.m. Friday. Storms should clear by about midnight.

The severe risk has drastically changed in the past 48 hours. With the most recent update as of 7:30 a.m. Friday, eastern Nebraska was upgraded to an Enhanced (Level 3 of 5) risk for higher confidence in numerous severe storms tracking through that area tonight.

The environment heading into this evening will favor large hail and significant high winds as storms move southeast through Nebraska. Large hail up to 2″+ is possible especially in the black hash marked area below.

The threat initially will be large hail, but these storms will transition to have more of a damaging wind threat later in the night as they’re approaching southeast Nebraska. Destructive, wind-driven hail could be a possibility in that transition zone from large hail to damaging winds closer to Columbus/Grand Island.

By the time those storms are in southeast Nebraska, gusts higher 75 mph will be possible.

A brief tornado also cannot be ruled out with this setup into Friday night.

Past Friday, this weekend will be mostly dry with isolated chances for a shower/thunderstorm on Saturday and a small chance for rain Sunday evening. Severe threat will remain low throughout the weekend after Friday night.

Early indications point toward a very warm end of the week next week, too.

Meteorologist Jessica Blum 
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