Thunderstorm rundown: Timing, placement over Michigan in next few days

The next three days will have an area of thunderstorms over Michigan. The area of storms will be in different spots each day. Here’s when you can plan on a thunderstorm at your Michigan location.

Firstly, none of these thunderstorms are expected to be officially called severe. The official definition of a severe thunderstorm has a 58 mph gust, one-inch diameter hail or obviously a tornado. The thunderstorms over the next three days will have heavy downpours but not last a very long time. I’d say most of us will get hit by a half hour to one hour thunderstorm or two.

The three periods of thunderstorms will be made by two different weather situations. Today’s thunderstorms are going to be more widely scattered than Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s storms. Today’s storms are going to be created by late afternoon heating and instability. This type of thunderstorm dissipates in the late evening and is done by midnight. The radar forecast below shows spotty thunderstorms developing over the southeast part of Lower Michigan from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. today.

If you are in the Ann Arbor area, Detroit area, Flint, Saginaw, Bay City and Midland this evening you could have a half-hour downpour. After sunset these thunderstorms will shrink and end.

Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s showers and thunderstorms will come on a slow moving cold front gradually meandering from northwest to southeast across Michigan. I want you to get the idea this isn’t a cold front racing through our state.

The radar forecast below shows us the stripe of thunderstorms across northern Lower Michigan, northwest Lower Michigan and west-central Lower Michigan Tuesday afternoon and then into the southeast half of Lower Michigan Wednesday.

So let’s quickly break down who gets rain Tuesday and who gets it Wednesday.

Tuesday’s rain will fall from Cadillac to Traverse City to Charlevoix, Petoskey and the rest of northern Lower Michigan. This isn’t an all-day rain. It will be a couple of hours of storms, mostly in the afternoon. The eastern Upper Peninsula will also have thunderstorms Tuesday.

Wednesday everything shifts into the southern half of Lower Michigan. I’m showing you the afternoon rain amounts, but you should know the morning hours will have the showers through Muskegon, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Saginaw, Bay City and Midland. The morning rain will be more scattered and lighter than the afternoon thunderstorms.

For those in Ann Arbor, Detroit, Jackson, Lansing and the Thumb you will have some streaky heavy downpours Wednesday afternoon and evening.

The basic rundown is rain possible in the Saginaw area this afternoon, northern Michigan Tuesday and southern Michigan Wednesday.

This should help you work and play around the rain and storms.