The good news for people across the Northeast is that the plume of wildfire smoke that made the air so difficult to breathe in the last week has largely dispersed, for now.

The bad news is that in its place Tuesday will be yet another run of severe storms that could bring torrential downpours of rain, flash flooding, powerful winds, large hail and even a possible tornado to areas that are still reeling from similar storms over the weekend.

Strong winds from morning thunderstorms brought down trees and caused power outages across the region, but major disruptions remained minimal by midday. The worst was expected during the second round Tuesday afternoon and through the evening.

The Storm Prediction Center, an arm of the National Weather Service, warned that tens of millions of people from Kentucky to New York were facing a risk of severe thunderstorms Tuesday. In many places, forecasters said, the greatest threat is likely to come from damaging wind gusts — some potentially as strong as a hurricane’s.

Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Washington are all in the bull’s-eye of an area that is likely to experience the most severe weather Tuesday. New York, Cleveland and Nashville, Tennessee, are in the next ring out, where the forecast still has meteorologists concerned, but the risk is slightly lower.

In Pennsylvania, the State College office of the weather service warned that Tuesday’s storms could reach a level of intensity to which only one or two systems rise each year. In Washington, forecasters warned late Monday that the ingredients were building for a “significant” severe weather situation to unfold Tuesday.

Heavy rainfall is also expected to become a significant concern Tuesday. Although the storms are forecast to move through the mid-Atlantic and Northeast relatively quickly, forecasters said repeated rounds of storms could pass over the same areas, producing high rainfall amounts that could lead to flash flooding.

In New York City, the storms are expected in two rounds: one between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., and another, more severe, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. The weather service office in New York warned that up to 2 inches of rain per hour could fall — easily enough to lead to flash flooding in urban areas. A flood watch was in effect for New York City and southeast Pennsylvania through to northern New Jersey through late Tuesday night. Flood watches were also in effect for areas of Kentucky, southern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

“While no two events are the same, the setup tomorrow is similar to what we saw last Saturday,” forecasters at the New York office of the weather service wrote late Monday night. In the New York area on Saturday, potent storms dropped huge amounts of rain over just a few hours, leading to flash flooding across the region. More than 3 inches of rain was recorded in Jersey City, New Jersey, and New York’s Manhattan borough, and one weather station near Newark, New Jersey, recorded 4 1/2 inches of rain.

Videos shared on social media showed people caught driving in floodwaters, including a box truck that became partially submerged under a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Erin McCann, Judson Jones and Nazaneen Ghaffar
c. 2026 The New York Times Company