Severe storms in the Midwest with rain and hail

A wave of severe storms will move across the Midwest and northern Plains midweek, bringing severe thunderstorms, damaging winds, flash flooding and possible tornadoes.

The storms will bear down on a broad swath of the Ohio, Mississippi and Tennessee valleys Tuesday afternoon, putting more than 18 million people in Tennessee, Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa at a slight risk of severe thunderstorms, the National Weather Service said. More than 19 million people were also at a slight risk of tornadoes, the agency said.

According to AccuWeather, the Ohio and Tennessee river valleys could see “torrential rain” from a storm complex that hit the area Monday evening.

Thunderstorms developing in Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday could have “severe potential,” the National Weather Service in Des Moines said on X. The western part of the state and northeastern Nebraska could see damaging winds up to 75 mph and large hail Tuesday night.

Authorities in Madison County, Iowa, about 40 miles southwest of Des Moines, warned residents that the area was under a thunderstorm watch until 5 a.m. Wednesday, according to a Facebook post. “The wind is blowing fast and should be out of here soon,” they wrote.

At the same time, scorching temperatures were forecast for the same area, with heat indexes expected to top 110 degrees in Omaha and Lincoln. The weather service issued an extreme heat warning through Wednesday night.

The thunderstorms could drop golf ball-sized hail across much of central North Dakota Tuesday evening, with damaging winds of up to 60 mph (96 km/h) expected.

Iowa already got some rain on Sunday, with Dayton and Marshalltown, two cities north of Des Moines, both reporting more than 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) of rain the next day, the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported.

More: Earthquakes happen all the time, you just don’t feel them. A guide to how they’re measured

Earlier, a storm system in the Midwest spawned 27 tornadoes, killing 3

The extreme weather comes weeks after a dangerous storm system, triggered by a derecho, battered the Midwest, spawning multiple tornadoes that caused flash flooding, killed multiple people and left more than 166,000 people in the area without power.

The weather service later confirmed that 27 tornadoes touched down in the Chicago area on July 15. A 44-year-old woman in Illinois was killed when a tree fell on her home during the storms.

Flash flooding in Illinois forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes as a dam threatened to collapse. An elderly couple died when their car was washed away.

Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA Today. You can reach her via email at [email protected]. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.