Tornadoes, Damaging Winds, And Icing – National Weather Outlook For February 26, 2023

by | Feb 26, 2023 | Weather

Tornado

National Weather Forecast

We continue to watch active weather across the lower 48 on Sunday. A system pushing out of the western United States will produce severe storms in the Southern Plains, with icing possible into the overnight hours in the Upper Midwest. A new system pushes into the western United States, bringing another round of rain and snow. A frontal boundary in New England will bring some snow chances.

A Moderate Risk of severe weather (threat level 4 of 5) is in place Sunday across parts of western Oklahoma, with an Enhanced Risk (threat level 3 of 5) stretching from the Texas Panhandle to far southwestern Missouri. The primary threat will be destructive winds with severe storms, followed by a tornado threat and some large hail.

Heavy snow continues to fall out west through the weekend and the first day of the work week, with several feet possible in some of the mountain ranges. Heavy rain will also be possible in the central United States, with up to 3” possible.

Meanwhile, icing will be possible across the Upper Midwest as we head into Sunday Night into Monday, with up to a quarter inch of ice possible from eastern Minnesota across central Wisconsin into Michigan.

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Rare black hole 1 billion times the mass of the sun could upend our understanding of galaxy formation

More from Live Science: “A rare supermassive black hole found hiding at the dawn of the universe could indicate that there were thousands more of the ravenous monsters stalking the early cosmos than scientists thought — and astronomers aren’t sure why. The primordial black hole is around 1 billion times the mass of our sun and was found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The ancient galaxy formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang and was spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile, in a tiny patch of sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon.”

Who shoulders Mother Nature’s cut of the Colorado River?

More from E&E News: “Alongside farmers, ranchers and sprawling urban cities, Mother Nature has long sipped her share of the Colorado River — draining away enough water through evaporation and seepage to support nearly 6 million families each year. But as decades of drought strain major reservoirs in the Mountain West, threatening future water supplies and hydropower, states are divided over who should be picking up nature’s tab for the huge amount of water lost on the 1,500-mile-long waterway. The Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — already account forsome 468,000 acre-feet of water that evaporates from its reservoirs each year. But the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — face no penalty for the more 1.5 million acre-feet that essentially disappears between Lees Ferry in Arizona and the U.S.-Mexico border, lost annually to an arid climate and leaks in canals that channel water to farms and communities.”

Climate change, urbanization drive major declines in L.A.’s birds

More from Berkeley News: “Climate change isn’t the only threat facing California’s birds. Over the course of the 20th century, urban sprawl and agricultural development have dramatically changed the landscape of the state, forcing many native species to adapt to new and unfamiliar habitats. In a new study, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, use current and historical bird surveys to reveal how land use change has amplified — and in some cases mitigated — the impacts of climate change on bird populations in Los Angeles and the Central Valley. The study found that urbanization and much hotter and drier conditions in L.A. have driven declines in more than one-third of bird species in the region over the past century. Meanwhile, agricultural development and a warmer and slightly wetter climate in the Central Valley have had more mixed impacts on biodiversity.”

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– D.J. Kayser