Virginia has ‘all the ingredients’ for damaging winds, hail, flooding on Monday

If you live in Virginia or anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic, you likely woke up Sunday morning to warnings of potential severe weather threats for the start of the work week.

Weather forecasters are predicting a large swath of Virginia to potentially face storms with flooding downpours, hail, damaging wind gusts and an isolated tornado risk.

“It looks like a pretty good threat of severe weather for Monday and Monday evening over much of Virginia,” said Bill Deger, a Senior Meteorlogist III at AccuWeather. “I think the greatest threats are Central and Eastern Virginia, Monday afternoon and evening.”

Deger said the Western and Southwestern parts of the state are also in the crosshairs late Sunday night into Monday morning.

“The threat really picks up when you get east of 81,” Deger said. “And especially when you get to the 95 corridor. In fact, AccuWeather has a high risk for severe weather there for tomorrow.”

Strong wind is the biggest concern for the state.

“I think damaging wind gusts are the primary concern, anywhere in the range of 60 to 70 miles an hour. We can’t even rule out wind gusts of 80 miles an hour,” Deger said. “That’s more than enough to obviously bring down trees and power lines and cause some big travel problems.”

Deger emphasized the strong wind gusts are most likely the worst in the higher risk area in Central and Eastern Virginia, beginning Monday afternoon and continuing into early Monday night.

“Of course, any thunderstorm can have dangerous lightning and heavy downpours,” Deger said. “We’re not expecting a tornado outbreak, but you can never rule it out with these types of thunderstorms.”

Deger said there is a strong area of low pressure coming through the Great Lakes and into the Northeast. There’s a frontal boundary draped south from a cold front that will sweep across the state during the day tomorrow into tomorrow night. The air mass out ahead of it, he said, provides the warmth and humidity which are needed for thunderstorms to develop.

“So we have all the ingredients kind of coming together for this higher than average risk for severe weather across the area,” Deger said.