***UPDATED SATURDAY 6:00 PM***

Good evening bloggers. We were privileged with some pleasant weather today, but it looks like our respite from the nice weather will only last one more day. It appears that widespread heavy rainfall and some severe weather can be expected Sunday night through early Tuesday morning. Some areas across the Midwest may pick up as much as 5 inches of rain. We'll talk about what to expect here in the Ozarks in tonight's post which you can expect around 9 PM.

Check back there as flash flooding and severe weather look likely for the beginning of the week and additional thunderstorm chances exist later in the week.

Josh deBerge

***UPDATED FRIDAY AT 6:30 PM***

For most, the threat of severe weather has ended for the evening. There will still be highly isolated thunderstorms capable of producing some torrential rainfall and flash flooding will remain a threat. A few isolated tornadoes and severe thunderstorms remain possible, but the chances are on the low side.

Josh deBerge

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Good afternoon everyone. It has been a busy afternoon with several tornado warnings for several counties already. The Highway Patrol earlier was tracking a tornado from near St. James to Steelville in Crawford County and we had numerous reports of funnel clouds and wall clouds as far west as Laclede County.

In addition, a very narrow band of intense rainfall fell over parts of the Springfield metro area dropping as much as 2 inches of rain in a short amount of time. In fact, since last night I picked up 3.45" of rain in my gauge on the southwest side of Springfield causing flash flooding in lots of locations. If driving this afternoon, use caution as additional rainfall is expected.

A Tornado Watch is in effect until 7 PM this evening for the locations below.

The airmass is destabilizing as we have seen some breaks in the cloud cover. Instability is running on the order of about 2,000 and will likely increase as peak heating approaches. This will allow additional thunderstorms to develop and will allow current storms to intensify. The better areas of shear are located primarily east of Highway 65 so those are the areas that I am most concerned about as far as tornadic potential.

There is also a jet streak that could increase storm relative helicity (shear) over the next few hours and increase the threat for tornadoes.

So, thunderstorms will become more widespread over the next 2 hours. As they move east of Highway 65, they will have a higher liklihood of rotating and producing tornadoes, however, the threat of tornadoes exists anywhere in the watch. The threat should subside several hours after sunset. In addition, these storms will drop copious amount of rain, will contain some large hail, and produce damaging wind gusts.

Stay with KSPR and KSPR.com for the latest weather information. I'll try to update the blog as I have time.

Josh deBerge