AccuWeather's Tony Laubach is watching the secondary threat area for severe storms in the central U.S. on April 28.
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00:00For a closer look at the setup in the south, we're now joined live by AccuWeather meteorologist
00:04and storm chaser Tony Laubach. He is in Vernon, Texas. And Tony, we've had some big hail in Texas
00:09in recent days. Yeah, we've seen some big hail and we've seen some tornado activity. In fact,
00:18several days in a row last week, especially in west Texas, out kind of around the Lubbock region,
00:23we saw pretty significant supercells that all were responsible for several tornadoes. We even
00:28saw that back into New Mexico over the weekend and expecting another round here a little bit further
00:33to the east across us is here in northwest Texas. We're currently stationed in Vernon, Texas. We're
00:39about 50 miles northwest of Wichita Falls there on U.S. 287. So several hours north and west of the
00:47Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. This is where we're kind of stationed up today. One of those classic
00:51hurry up and wait type of days where we got up this morning, ran, got all the cars loaded up and did all
00:57that good stuff and then worked our way down a short drive to get down into this particular area.
01:02And now we're sitting and waiting. You talked about storms already way up to the north in Minnesota.
01:07We're probably a couple hours at least, if not more, from seeing storm development down in this
01:13particular region. We're targeting areas near the dry line. If you're wondering why we're not further
01:17north in the more active risk zone, logistics primarily playing the most part in that as our drive
01:23from Oklahoma City area all the way up to that would have been a very, very tough drive to do.
01:28So we are kind of playing what we consider the secondary target in terms of chasing, but certainly
01:33one that could have some high impacts. We talked about some of the weather we saw over the weekend
01:37just up the road in Lawton, Oklahoma over the weekend saw significant, even deadly flash flooding
01:43in some of those areas. So this is an area that has been hit pretty hard over the last several days
01:48and again expecting those storms to have some pretty intense caliber on it with in terms of
01:52talking about large hail, maybe up to baseball size and that potential for tornadoes. You hear some of
01:58the wind over my mic on occasion here, guys. That wind has been shifting throughout the day. We kind of
02:02started out of a south-southwest direction and they've started to back a little bit back toward the
02:07southeast. That is kind of the sweet spot in terms of what you're looking for for tornadic supercells
02:12is that southeast surface flow. We're starting to see just a little bit of that backing, not quite
02:17out of the preferred direction for tornadoes, guys, but certainly bringing a concern that these storms
02:22as they fire over the next several hours will produce that potential for, again, that giant hail
02:28and that tornado potential there as well. All right. Accuother meteorologist and storm chaser
02:33Tony Lawback, thanks for the update. We'll check back with you later. And we're going to take a closer
02:37look at what's going on right now on radar. And we've had some strong storms, some severe out there
02:42already. And as we jump in on the current cluster of thunderstorms, you know, this is only going to get more
02:47active as we step deeper into the evening here. We have a series of about five severe thunderstorm warnings
02:53at the moment. Earlier, we did have a tornado warning that expired at 3 p.m. Central Time.