Officials: Severe weather possible Wednesday in Wichita area

Dust off your severe-weather coping tools.

They may come in handy over the next couple of days – especially on Wednesday, weather officials say.

“I think Wednesday is a ‘pay attention’ day, definitely,” said Mike Smith, a senior vice president for AccuWeather.

A textbook set-up for strong thunderstorms is shaping up for Kansas, weather officials say, with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico colliding with unstable air and a storm front moving east out of the Rockies. That’s a common occurrence in the spring.

But it’s October knocking on the door, not May.

“If we get the instability like we expect, we could have some supercell thunderstorm development” in the Wichita area on Wednesday, said Jim Caruso, a meteorologist with the local branch of the National Weather Service.

Strong thunderstorms are more likely in central Kansas on Tuesday, forecasters say, but tornadoes are not considered a threat.

A severe-weather outlook issued for Wednesday by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., cautioned “large hail should be the greatest severe weather threat, though damaging winds are possible as well” across much of central and south-central Kansas.

If the dew point climbs into the upper 60s, the statement warned, “tornado potential could be locally enhanced.”

Smith said he doesn’t think much more will have to be added to the atmospheric soup for tornadoes to be a concern on Wednesday, however.

“There’s pretty good instability out there already,” he said. “I’m not sure we’re going to have to get much more unstable than we are right now.”

At the least, weather officials say, the storms look likely to bring much-needed rain to Wichita. Less than a half-inch of rain has been recorded in September, nearly 2.5 inches below normal.

“We’ve been in a hole,” Smith said. “Fifty miles north or 50 miles south, they’ve gotten plenty of rain.”

Forecasters are optimistic that the midweek storms will bring an inch or more of rain to the city.

“I’d love an inch of rain out of it,” Caruso said. “That’d be great.”

This story was originally published September 29, 2014 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Officials: Severe weather possible Wednesday in Wichita area."