Waiting for official rating of Thursday's tornadoes while also watching for new storms today

A very active evening of weather for many locales on Thursday. The National Weather Service is currently conducting storm surveys in the areas hit by suspected tornadoes last night. It may be not be until later this afternoon that an official rating is given. 

In the meantime, we have to stay alert to another round of strong to severe weather for today. This will not be anything like what we had yesterday, but there may still be a stronger storm to contend with. The latest risk outlook from the Storm Prediction Center has us in a Level 1 (Marginal) risk for today:

The time frame on storms popping up begins around 2:30p to 3:00p. Expect spotty to isolated activity. This is a snapshot from our in-house computer forecast model around 5pm this evening:


For the strongest of storms that pop today, the concerns would mainly be for hail and damaging wind gusts.


Part of the reason we may get gusts to top 60mph is due to the heat we'll have around the area. Most spots are expected to climb into the 80s this afternoon:


If Milwaukee gets anything over 80°, it would make today the warmest day of the year thus far. Don't get used to it... Next week is going to get a lot cooler with almost every day spend in the 50s(!) for high temperatures. Welcome to Wisconsin.
-JD