Big A$$ Hail & Isolated Tornadoes in the Midwest Today

Scattered to widespread storms are expected to develop on Thursday evening along and ahead of a cold front. The best chance for a tornado or two is within a corridor from Bloomington IL to Fort Wayne IN to Findlay OH, with a larger corridor at risk of significant hail over 2" in diameter.

When I was recording my U.S. Tornado Forecast video for the YouTube channel on Tuesday I kept wanting to say "big ass hail" when discussing the recent significant hail events we've experienced across the Midwest in early 2026, and the risk that is once again present across portions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio this evening.

A colleague and I have been discussing these anomalous hail events, likely driven by anomalously strong EMLs (elevated mixed layers) as a result of significant drought across the Southern Plains. That hot dry air is drawn into the Midwest by areas of low pressure tracking out of the Plains, just above the surface is serves as as a stout EML/cap keeping a lid on these volatile environments until peak heating and allowing for explosive supercell updrafts generating 2, 3, in some cases, 6 inch, record-breaking hailstones. The background state is very similar to what we experienced in 2023 with a transitioning La Niña and widespread drought in the Southern Plains leading to anomalously intense supercell activity in the early season across the Midwest.

I wouldn't call today the most potent setup we've seen this year, but the risk for significant severe weather is definitely present. When forecasting tornadoes, a southward sagging boundary with super cold air on the north side of it is going to really work against this potential.

That stout cap is likely to keep a lid on the environment across much of the warm sector across Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, where an unbothered supercell might tap into the abundant low-level shear, steep lapse rates, and unseasonably strong instability and produce a couple of tornadoes. It's certainly possible one or two supercells tries to erupt out ahead of the front somewhere from Illinois to Indiana, but in the absence of a big upper-level storm system approaching with tons of lift or some sort of pre-frontal wave or remnant boundary there's not much to force an updraft through the cap.

That means you're pretty much reliant on the sharp cold front to force convective initiation, which it should easily be able to do as it starts moving south into the unstable warm sector late this afternoon. Any storm that develops along or near the front from northeast Illinois into northern Indiana and northwest Ohio will have plenty of shear + instability to organize into supercells with the potential for significant hail over 2" in diameter.

The tornado potential is a lot more questionable. With storms forming very close to the front, and the front sinking south increasingly fast through the day, storms will be prone to being undercut by the cold front. Storms forming or moving onto the cold side of the boundary will still have the ability to remain supercellular and produce severe hail, but being cut-off from the warm, buoyant near-surface air on the warm side of the boundary tornado production will be mostly shut down.

There's a narrow corridor where I think one of two things could happen - either you get a storm or two to form far enough ahead of the front that it's got an hour or two to work with warm sector air and spin up a tornado or two thanks to an increasingly strong low-level jet and favorable low-level wind shear... OR, the front orients itself in a northwest to southeast manner briefly allowing a storm to ride the front, or avoid being rapidly undercut by the cold air. There's going to be a ton of vorticity along this boundary, and if somehow a storm is able to hang in that favorable zone for 30-60 minutes, a tornado can't be ruled out. These two possibilities seem most likely in the pink highlighted zone from Bloomington IL to Fort Wayne IN to Findlay OH.

Otherwise, I think we're mostly looking at a hail event today. Storms begin forming and increasing in coverage between 3-6 PM CT, becoming widespread with the most significant severe impacts between 6-9 PM CT. Rain and thunderstorms will become more widespread between 9 PM-12 AM CT, but the severe weather risk will begin to fade closer to Midnight as the cold front begins to clear the entire risk area.

I'm personally not likely to venture far from home base here in Champaign-Urbana, IL today. I'm not convinced the risk for tornadoes is any higher across Indiana and Ohio than it is here in our corner of northeast Illinois and I'm probably going to hang tight and watch areas to my immediate north-northwest in the Bloomington IL corner of my highlighted risk zone and just hope for something easy to pick off and observe.

Got a lot going on today between the Illini playing in the Sweet 16 and Opening Day at Wrigley Field for the Chicago Cubs and next week continues to look like a busy week for severe weather across the Central U.S.