Tornado watch issued for Tarrant, Dallas, Denton, Collin counties through Wednesday night
A tornado watch was issued at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday that included 36 North and Central Texas counties. Tarrant, Dallas, Denton, Collin and Parker were some of the areas in the alert which the National Weather Service says is in effect until 8 p.m.
The specter of the impending storms wreaked havoc with travel out of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Wednesday afternoon. About 1 in 4 flights was delayed as of 2:30 p.m., for a total of 258 departing aircraft because of the weather, according to FlightAware. At least 186 flights out of DFW were canceled. One traveler posted on X that passengers were waiting up to an hour for luggage because lightning was preventing ground crews from working.
A cold front pushing south from Oklahoma into the Red River counties could pick up steam later Wednesday afternoon as it hits warm unstable air over the Dallas-Fort Worth region spawning storms with large hail, damaging winds and possibly tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service Fort Worth office.
“The front will interact with an extremely moist and unstable air mass as it slowly sags south of the Red River by midday Wednesday,” Fort Worth meteorologist Miles Langfeld wrote on the NWS website.
Large hail is the primary threat from these early storms that the weather service expects to hit before noon. But the region could see damaging winds later in the afternoon, between 2-6 p.m., and into the evening hours. The tornado threat is low unless the storms form clusters.
“As we move into Wednesday afternoon, daytime heating ahead of the front will likely allow for the development of more scattered thunderstorms,” according to Langefeld.
[RELATED: Ever wondered what it’s like to be struck by lightning? This Fort Worth man found out.]
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The weather service is also keeping an eye on another storm front pushing in from the west, forming a line along San Angelo. If the front moving south from Oklahoma stalls over North Texas, we may see more severe thunderstorms that could possibly produce tornadoes.
We saw this pattern of storms arriving later in the day Tuesday, as a cold front pushes into a region of unstable heated air. Dallas-Fort Worth will see more of the same pattern Thursday, then we head into a hot and humid weekend.
The weather service warns residents to be aware of the changing weather. We are in the middle of tornado season which normally runs from March to May. Hail, damaging winds and tornadoes are an ever present danger. Only last week, a Fort Worth man found out what it’s like to be struck by lightning.
