Gusty thunderstorms swept across the central U.S. on Aug. 14.
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00:00We are joined by AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach. He is in northern Colorado. Tony, we got some wind out there in Weld County.
00:11Yeah, just a little bit here, Jeff. This is what we call outflow. We talk about storms, we talk about outflow.
00:18This is the direct result of it, especially here on days like today.
00:23The last several days we've seen very humid, muggy conditions. Dew point temperatures, upper 50s, low 60s.
00:30You've got temperatures in the 80s. You get storms that are wet. They cause the flooding. Some of that we've showed you earlier.
00:36Today, a lot of that moisture has been scoured out, so you've got temperatures in the mid-80s again.
00:41But you have dew points in the mid-40s, which means you've got about a 40 degree temperature dew point difference.
00:46And what happens is these storms barf out a bunch of wind.
00:51We'll show you the radar, because if you compare this to previous days, there's not a lot of bright colors.
00:57There's some scattered stuff there, but notice, though, in northeast Colorado, we have no warnings.
01:01We don't have a ton of red on the map. That is because a lot of these storms are drier storms.
01:06They are barfing out outflow. The rain evaporates before it hits the ground, but it is still bringing some wind.
01:12We will show you, though, that the storms, though, still look pretty good.
01:16This was earlier today down near Dekono as one of those storms came off the foothills.
01:21This one was one of the stronger storms we've seen in northeast Colorado here today and certainly looks impressive.
01:27These high-based, high-plain storms always do dump some heavy rain at times,
01:31did a little bit of street flooding in some typically prone areas, but certainly nothing too terribly impactful
01:37other than to slow down some of the early rush hour traffic on the north side of Denver.
01:41That's been really the extent and the strongest of the storms that we have seen pretty much throughout the day today.
01:47But as you can hear as I'm struggling to talk into the microphone here, Jeff, we are dealing with the outflow winds here.
01:54My house a little bit down the street clocked a gust at about 48 miles per hour, so under severe criteria.
02:00And Lindsey, who runs our little circus here, our producer behind the scenes,
02:05I'm going to see if I can get the hat to go flying. It's not going to fly off now.
02:09Hang on, it's trying. Jeff, she wants me to lose this hat.
02:13Lindsey wants me to lose this hat in the wind, and I just don't think it's going to happen here.
02:17It's just too tight on my big head here.
02:19Very firmly secured to your dome there. Very nice. Thanks for that report there, Tony.
02:24Pretty good wind into Colorado Weld County. Pretty good outflow.
02:28Well, we are dealing with some severe weather.
02:30In fact, there's a tornado warning for some into north central Kansas,
02:33so we're going to slowly pull away from Colorado and take another step east.
02:37Here is a relatively new severe thunderstorm watch.
02:40At first glance here, you can see we're looking at areas under a severe thunderstorm watch
02:44from central Kansas, Rice County, all the way up into central Iowa, almost to Des Moines proper,
02:51and that runs until 1 a.m. central time, so an hour past midnight.
02:55Lincoln and Omaha, St. Joseph, Kansas City, you're in there.
02:58Topeka and Lawrence also included within this severe thunderstorm watch.
03:01Now, separate from that, we're going to turn the lightning off,
03:04and I wanted to show you a tornado warning.
03:06There are about 670 people here under this tornado warning.