STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
There's been a lot of severe weather this week, snowstorms dropping as many as 12 inches of snow across the Midwest over the last couple of days. This includes a broad area stretching from Colorado to Michigan.
DAVID ROTH: This is the kind of a system you might see in October or in March, where you have a very heavy rain hazard right against a heavy snow hazard.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That is David Roth. He is a forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md. Roth is also monitoring the storms across the South that brought heavy rain, hail, tornadoes and flash floods to parts of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
ROTH: Since there's so much strong wind in the low levels, it allows things like severe thunderstorms and tornadoes to form. It's a very good setup for heavy rain, so you get flash flooding too.
INSKEEP: Storms in the South have caused a lot of damage, killed several people and left more than 147,000 customers without power. Now storms are expected to move into the Northeast next. They already had some snow the other day. Now they get some more, bringing heavy rain and wind to parts of the New England region.
MARTIN: But Roth says even as these storms pass, people in those areas need to remain alert.
ROTH: We're going to have another storm kind of like this in a few days.
MARTIN: He says the next storms could bring more excessive rainfall and snowfall to the Midwest and the South.
ROTH: But the problem is now the Eastern United States and the Southern United States have soils that are getting more and more saturated. And this time of the year, since it doesn't get as warm, you don't get as much evaporation, so the soils don't dry out quite like they might in June, July or August.
MARTIN: And that can lead to toppled trees, landslides and road closures. So be watchful and stay safe.
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