Chicagoans basked in the year’s third 70° temperature Tuesday—a June-level reading more than 20° above normal. But, while a real treat here, that same warm air mass fueled explosive t-storm development to the west. By late Tuesday evening, thunderstorms, some towering more than 9 miles above the Nation’s Heartland, had organized into a series of lines stretching across sections of 7 states, generating more than 130 reports of severe weather from Texas to Minnesota. At least nine twisters dipped from the stormy skies in Kansas as part of one of the largest single day outbreaks of severe weather thus far in 2005. A mammoth spring storm was behind the thundery outbreak. But to its west, 70 m.p.h. wind gusts delivered a cold rain and some snow horizontally to the high Plains and Front Range of Colorado—precipitation which extended east into Nebraska.
-Tom Skilling
WGN-TV Chief Meteorologist Tom Skilling and the WGN Weather Center staff provide daily coverage of weather in the Chicago area.
