"Substantial severe weather risk" for Sunday

That's not the kind of phrase you want to see in your email inbox. This morning, the forecasters at the National Weather Service in Paducah sent a message to their storm spotter mailing list, stating that:

"As of this writing there is a SUBSTANTIAL SEVERE WEATHER RISK for our region Sunday, with some severe weather threat possible as early as Saturday PM."

The Storm Prediction Center has already highlighted the threat for our region, which is somewhat unusual this many days in advance.

SPC advises that "supercells with a risk for tornadoes will be possible."

But that's not all! The storm spotter message from Paducah includes this little gem: "This looks similar to the Halloween system in terms of very strong winds fields but has the potential to have even greater instability."

Yes, the Halloween storm: that monster produced 9 confirmed tornadoes in Southeast Missouri, including one each in Bollinger and Cape Girardeau counties. That doesn't count another tornado across the river at East Cape or the microburst with 95 mph winds that struck the south side of Cape. This map produced by the NWS Paducah office shows the extent of the confirmed damage:

Our next system might be a total dud, of course, but there's a chance it could be worse than the last system... and, well, that's not good.