NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – A serious storm setup that could shake up your weekend plans across southeast Louisiana. Scattered showers and a few thunderstorms are already popped up this afternoon, but the most impactful round of weather arrives overnight tonight into early Saturday morning. A potential mesoscale convective system, or MCS, is expected to fire up over the Red River Valley area and surge southeast, possibly reaching the New Orleans metro between roughly 2 and 7 a.m. Saturday. If that system stays strong as it pushes through, damaging wind gusts, large hail, and frequent cloud-to-ground lightning are all on the table. Forecasters are keeping a close eye on a leftover boundary to the north that could act as a highway, guiding the storms right into our area.
That means the hundreds of thousands of people heading out to Jazz Fest at the Fair Grounds this weekend and the golf fans lining the fairways at the Zurich Classic out at TPC Louisiana in Avondale need to stay weather-aware and keep a plan in their back pocket. Saturday could bring a second round of afternoon storms after the overnight system clears, though confidence in that scenario is lower. A possible third round of storms Saturday night into Sunday morning is also on the radar, with another MCS potentially trying to push southeast out of the Red River area again…