Breakfast Brief: More tropical trouble, East heats up

Florida continues to experience heavy rains and flooding, while thunderstorm focus shifts towards the Northeast and Central Plains.

While Wednesday brought a brief respite from the heavy rains, Florida, particularly the southern regions, is bracing for more wet conditions through at least Saturday. With already saturated soils, it won't take much to spark flash flooding. As of Wednesday afternoon, 48-hour rainfall totals indicated that many locales across Florida, including Miami, Hollywood, Port Everglades, and Fort Lauderdale, hit daily rainfall records.

Rain and storms won't be confined to the Sunshine State. Today, an eastward-moving cold front will sweep across the Northeast, triggering showers and thunderstorms. The focus of strong to severe thunderstorms will be along a line from northern Virginia to southern New Hampshire, just west of the major I-95 metro areas.

A second area of concern for strong to severe storms today will be across the Central Plains, including parts of eastern Colorado, southwest Wyoming, and western Kansas. The primary threat from these storms will be large hail and wind gusts of up to 80 mph, beginning in the mid-afternoon.

A tropical system coined Invest-90 was pushed into the western Atlantic, with a low chance of developing into a tropical cyclone over the next 7 days. Meanwhile, a broad area of low pressure is forecast to form over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico this weekend or early next week. A tropical depression could form during the early or middle part of next week, bringing heavy tropical downpours to portions of eastern Mexico.

Now that we're in the longest days of the year, we know you have plenty of outdoor activities planned. We're here to support that! We've added length-of-day information to the Astro info card on all iOS devices. And don't worry Android users, this feature is coming to you soon, too.