Hurricane Katrina not expected to impact Iowa weather

While Hurricane Katrina has reached land and is causing all kinds of weather problems — a forecaster says the storm won’t impact Iowa. National Weather Service meteorologist Marc Russell says the storm turned the wrong way to have an impact on our weather. He says it’ll move up through the southeastern states and there’ll be a lot of flooding in the lower Mississippi River Valley. He says it’ll then move into the Ohio River Valley and make it an active weather pattern in the eastern third of the United States. Russell says there might be a small sign of the Hurricane for southern Iowa. He says the southeast corner of the state might see some cloudiness, but he says we won’t see any precipitation from the storm. Russell says there’s really not anything in Iowa weather that equates to a hurricane. He says to get winds speeds like a hurricane, you’d need tornadoes of an F-2 or F-3 category. He says severe storms here are around 60 miles-an-hour, with the worst at 80 or 90. He says the sustained winds in this hurricane are 145 miles-an-hour and Russel you don’t see those type of sustained winds in Iowa.