National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Dangerous Heat and Heavy Rainfall into the Weekend

Hot temperatures and high humidity are forecast to continue across the mid-Mississippi Valley into this weekend. Heat Advisories remain in effect. Heavy to excessive rainfall occurring at times through the weekend could bring areas of flooding to parts of the northern Rockies, upper Midwest, central Great Lakes, and southern New England. Read More >

Overview

This "northwest flow" event (i.e. flow aloft was from the northwest) lead to a number of damaged houses, outbuildings, power poles, trees and other vegetation due to strong outflow winds and two separate microbursts originating from the same supercell thunderstorm. This supercell developed just east of Dumas, Texas and moved south through Amarillo and Canyon. Initially the supercell produced very large hail to the size of baseballs north of Amarillo, and would drop 2 inch hail in Amarillo. The storm produced its first microburst as it started becoming outflow dominant in southern Amarillo where some power poles were damaged. The second more powerful microburst occurred just south of Amarillo and would lead to some considerable damage with winds up to 90 mph estimated based on damage between Amarillo and Canyon along and near county road 1541. During this time, the storm also dumped 2 to 6 inches of mostly dime size hail (although the were some reports of hail up to the size of golf balls as well) along its path. Another storm would become severe briefly near Spearman producing ping-pong ball size hail, but dissipated within an hour or so.

Image Image Image
Looking north from 3 east of Canyon around 8:45 PM CDT by Aaron Ward Radar reflectivity and base velocity of the storm at 8:53 PM CDT.  Looking north from 3 east of Canyon around 8:55 PM CDT by Aaron Ward
nws logo Media use of NWS Web News Stories is encouraged!
Please acknowledge the NWS as the source of any news information accessed from this site.
nws logo