March 30 (UPI) — At least 1 person is dead after a swath of severe weather ripped across a section of the United States that stretched from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Texas, spawning tornadoes, damaging straight line winds and baseball sized hail.
Dangerous storms continued to threaten a large portion of the United States through Sunday night into Monday, according to the National Weather Prediction Center.
“To the warm side of that front in the South, we’ll have enough moisture and instability to get thunderstorms, and some of them could be severe,” said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center.
Sunday night, the fierce weather blew down power lines and trees in Ingham County, Mich., which is northwest of Ann Arbor and has a population of about 284,000.
The storm was created when a mass old cold air over Michigan collided with a warm front in the South, which creates optimal conditions for volatile thunderstorms.
The severe weather was predicted to persist or intensify Sunday night into Monday across Missouri and Illinois, and reach into Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas, the Lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys.
The storms could become larger and produce unpredictable and intense outbreaks. Forecasters warned of hail that could grow to be as large as three inches in diameter in northeast Texas, northwestern Louisiana, Arkansas, southeastern Missouri, Southern Illinois and western Ohio. Parts of western Kentucky and Tennessee could be threatened.
On Monday, the dangerous weather will shift east causing the greatest risk in a region stretching from Virginia southwestward into Alabama, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, where storms are expected to be more intense and dangerous.