Severe Storms, Tornado Threat Moving Across Louisiana
The National Weather Service radar from reporting stations in Lake Charles and in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans area have their radar screens lit up like Christmas Trees this morning. No, all that green you see on the scan is not in celebration of St. Patrick's Day it's rain. The yellow and the red you see represented on the scan, that's very heavy rain.
This snapshot of the radar was made at 0150 AM CDT.
Forecasters are also concerned that contained within those heavy rain bands associated with some of the stronger storms there could be wind shear which might result in rotation. Of course, rotating storms are not good, they usually lead to funnel clouds and tornadoes and during the nighttime hours, those storms can be even more dangerous.
Because of this threat of helicity in the upper atmosphere, the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for almost all of South Louisiana for the early morning hours of Friday. The watch area includes portions of the state as far west as Lake Charles, De Ridder and Leesville to points as far east as the western suburbs of New Orleans.
The areas in bright yellow are the areas affected by the Tornado Watch.
If you're not great with geography that Tornado Watch, which is in effect until 0700 AM this morning does include all of Acadiana. This includes the cities of Lafayette, Crowley, New Iberia, Opelousas, St. Martinville and Abbeville too.
The showers and storms are associated with a frontal system that is expected to push through the area by daybreak this morning. That's the bad news. The good news is that behind the frontal system there is much better weather.
In fact the forecast for the weekend includes mostly sunny skies and seasonable temperatures for the region. But don't let your weather guard down too far over the weekend. Forecasters say another strong frontal system is expected to bring yet another severe weather threat to the Gulf South by as early as Tuesday.