Arizona Weather Force has issued three weather alerts for South, South-Central, and Western Arizona effective now into the overnight, with increased metro storms Wednesday and Wednesday overnight.
Zones Issued For: Santa Cruz County – Pima County – Western half of Maricopa County – Western Pinal County – Central Maricopa County.
Discussion: A ridge of high pressure over New Mexico will bring a strong southeast to northwest flow across the alert zones today. Storms will form first across the Severe Thunderstorm Watch box this afternoon and move west-northwest across the entire box. As these storms move, outflow generated with them overnight, along with an impulse out of Mexico will ignite a lightning show across the Thunderstorm Watch zone. So, if you’re in Gila Bend north to west of Phoenix, you are in line for an overnight light show. I decided to put Phoenix eastward into a regular weather advisory just in case the storm outflow wants to pop isolated activity there.
Storms today in the Severe Thunderstorm Watch zone will have the chance at isolated tornadoes, damaging winds, large hail, and flooding in the strongest cells.
WEDNESDAY AND WEDNESDAY NIGHT: A much stronger impulse will come in, which looks similar to this past weekend for the Tucson, Pinal, and Phoenix forecast zones, along otherwise the I-10 corridor and north through Prescott/Payson and the Show Low zones. Expect an increase in overnight storms then. Official alerts will be issued accordingly here at Arizona Weather Force for this event so stay tuned.
A Severe Thunderstorm Watch here at AZWF is issued 0-12 hours before the event is expected.
As always, we take it one day at a time with these events