Weather Alert update: Tracking storms, with risk of damaging wind, lightning, and rare tornado

This is what satellite looks like right now as we look at the big picture, the yellow highlighting that you can see out towards the west. That is actually a tornado watch that's going to be in effect and these are our main concerns as we head through the morning or rather the afternoon hours now for today. Wind damage, there is a risk for tornado and it's going to be extremely humid and windy outside as well. As far as what I have going on right now, you can see there is not a lot on radar popping in eastern mass, but that's our tornado watch that's in effect in the colors that you can see out west in New York. Those are actually active warnings. That means severe weather is happening in some of those spots right now. We don't have a ton. We've got a couple showers beginning to pop up in Connecticut and in central mass, southern New Hampshire, but that line out to the west, that's the one that we're going to be watching as we move into the afternoon hours. You can see with future cast come early afternoon, it really heats up in areas like Vermont and western Massachusetts as well as parts of New Hampshire. That line is probably where we're going to have some damaging wind gusts. We could have some gusts 70, maybe even 80 miles per hour and that would do some pretty big damage that's comparable to the damage that you can see from a weak tornado as well. We have enough spin in the atmosphere that we could see a tornado locally as well. You can see that line then passes through Worcester and Boston as we get into the mid to late afternoon, probably lining up with the evening commute. As far as travel concerns go, it's really for me going to be mid to late afternoon that I'm most concerned about severe weather in the Boston area. Again, I can't rule out a tornado here in southern New England, but the potential is pretty high for some wind damage along with some of these storms. It's going to be a blinding rain as the rain comes through. There could be debris out there for the evening commute, so we just want everybody to be safe and prepared today. You can see damaging wind gusts top concern, then tornado, and then hail. This is a one-day only severe weather risk. As we go into the nighttime, we're going to be able to drop that threat and it gets quiet again, but of course we're going to be staying on top of it throughout the afternoon. I'm going to be here. I'm Chief Meteorologist Cherie Spear and we've also got Meteorologist Vicki Graf that's going to be coming on board as well to keep you guys safe and prepared both online and on air.