A rare combination of heavy rain, extreme winds and snow are set to create another round of winter weather havoc in the Kansas City region over the next 24 hours.
Starting at about midnight Wednesday, the National Weather Service says blizzard-like conditions will descend on the Kansas City region, bearing persistent wind gusts that could reach up to 70 miles per hour overnight, along with up to 2 inches of snow.
That will come after steady rain throughout the day Tuesday is expected to dump 1 to 2 inches of precipitation in the area.
“We’re getting into the transition season of spring. So it’s not uncommon to have storms that produce strong winds,” said Chris Bowman, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Kansas City field office in Pleasant Hill, Missouri. “But this is like, on a whole other level. I’ve been here since 2009, and I can’t remember an event like this.”
A powerful storm moves in today – Wed., bringing multiple hazards.
Widespread rain, isolated severe storm possible this afternoon (wind/hail main threats, low tornado risk)
60-70 mph wind gusts tonight (eastern KS & western MO)
Blizzard Conditions Tonight pic.twitter.com/4GDYECuWzK— NWS Kansas City (@NWSKansasCity) March 4, 2025
Expect high winds throughout the night into Wednesday
The National Weather Service is expecting rapidly deepening climactic surface pressure to cause significant wind gusts to start at about midnight.
“We could easily see wind gusts over 60 miles an hour. And that’s not just one hour. It’s multiple hours of that kind of wind that we we could be seeing tonight,” he said. “For Johnson County, we could be looking at 6 to 10 hours of wind gusts in excess of 60 miles an hour.”
Along with that, an overnight blast of snow will make driving difficult, Bowman said.
“When you combine that snowfall with the really strong wind gusts, you start to reduce your visibility and lead to blizzard conditions,” he said.
The combination of the rain that is falling during the day Tuesday, along with the predicted snow, could potentially cause icy roads on Wednesday morning.
“Temperatures in Johnson County get around freezing as you’re getting towards sunrise tomorrow [Wednesday],” said Ryan Cutter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Kansas City field office. “So it might be at 6 or 7 a.m. before this surface cold air really gets in. So you might not have that much, (but) I don’t want to say (there will be) no ice.”
The blizzard conditions are expected to taper off at about 6 a.m., Wednesday, Bowman said. Even when that goes away, the winds are still expected to be stronger than usual.
“We’re still probably looking at 45 to 50 mile-an-hour winds after sunrise tomorrow,” he said. “The winds don’t actually start to really taper off until tomorrow evening; at six or seven o’clock is when the system finally starts to pull out.”
People should prepare for strong winds
Motorists should take all precautions to avoid being part of a crash.
“Drive slow, take your time (and) allow plenty of room between you and other vehicles,” Cutter said.
Even if people aren’t on the road when winds are strong, they can do their part by securing loose items in their yards, like fallen tree limbs and trash cans.
“Those are probably the big things, just securing those items around your house (like) trash cans and whatnot,” he said. “People that have trash delivery in the morning, you’re going to not want to set your cans out because they will be gone by the time you wake up.”
In case of downed power lines, Evergy said that it will have crews on standby to help secure areas where power lines have fallen and bring them back online as quickly as they can.
“We will have all available crews ready to go and to deploy to where there are outages,” Courtney Lewis, Evergy senior communications manager, said. “We have a large service area, and we have service centers where we keep our equipment strategically placed along highways and easy access to main thoroughfares, so that way, we can get to places if we need to.”
Report an outage and Evergy’s outage map here.
Schools are examining how to reclaim days off
The blizzard-like conditions carry the possibility of causing another day off for Johnson County schools on Wednesday.
Johnson County districts were already considering how best to possibly make up for class time lost to multiple inclement weather days in the past two months.
Most local school districts — including Blue Valley, Olathe, Shawnee Mission and USD 232 in De Soto — have already gone over the number of inclement weather days they budgeted for.
On Monday, the USD 232 Board of Education unanimously voted to reclaim a planned day off on April 21 as a regular school day.
The board also authorized Superintendent Cory Gibson to make additional adjustments to the school, like adding minutes to the school day or extending the school year, if USD 232 keeps having to call off more school days.
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