When Will Severe and Hazardous Weather Strike?
Severe and hazardous weather can include conditions produced by thunderstorms, including damaging winds, tornadoes, large hail, flooding and flash flooding, and winter storms associated with freezing rain, sleet, snow and strong winds.
NOAA satellites don't just help us monitor severe and hazardous weather, but also help us analyze weather patterns to predict when and where it will strike.
Two waterspouts touching down near a house.
Severe and Hazardous Weather Common Phenomena
Thunderstorms
Severe thunderstorms are capable of producing hail that is an inch or larger or wind gusts over 58 mph.
Convection
Convection is the vertical transport of heat and moisture by updrafts and downdrafts in an unstable atmosphere.
Hurricanes
The term hurricane is used for Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclones with maximum sustained winds of 74 mph, located east of the International Dateline to the Greenwich Meridian.
Tornadoes
Tornadoes are narrow, swiftly rotating columns of air that extend from the base of a thunderstorm to the ground. About 1,200 tornadoes occur in the U.S. annually.
Floods
Floods are an overflow of water onto land that is normally dry. Floods can happen during heavy rains, when ocean waves come on shore, when snow melts too fast, or when dams or levees break.
Lightning
Lightning is the buildup and discharge of electrical energy, caused by the attraction between positive and negative charges in the atmosphere.
Hail
Hail consists of pellets of frozen rain which fall in showers from cumulonimbus clouds.
Derechos
A derecho is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath.