The heat of summer days can sometimes be at odds with the cool of the nights, which can create instances of severe weather like we’ve seen recently.

The thunderstorms that swept through the Raccoon Valley Radio listening area this week were indicative of the extreme temperature shifts that can occur this time of year. Guthrie and Adair County Emergency Management Coordinator Bob Kempf explains, “Any time, we get this type of heating and take that cooling-off into the night, or in the overnight hours, a lot of times we have the small pop-up thunderstorms that can come through our area. A lot of the time they don’t end up being particularly severe. They can, it just depends on what the conditions are at that particular point.”

Kempf adds, these types of storms are usually scattered, but can drop a large amount of rain in a short time period, while also having the threat of lightning.