The potential for severe weather will continue through the weekend and into next week as a weather system continues to linger over the south, a National Weather Center meteorologist said Thursday.

Chad Entremont, meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Jackson, said additional storms in Oklahoma and the southern plains and Northeast Texas are forecast to bring severe weather into Mississippi Thursday evening and into early Friday morning.

The predicted storms continue a pattern of severe weather that began Tuesday and continues through Thursday that resulted in the area being placed under several severe thunderstorm alerts Wednesday and Thursday morning.

“And as we go for another couple of days into and through the weekend, the details are hard to figure out but there remain solid rain chances each day and unfortunately there continues to be a severe weather risk each of the days as we go through the weekend,” he said. “We’re not out of the pattern that’s supporting severe weather each day.”

Entremont said the problem is caused by a frontal system, calling it “an axis of moisture that is right over our region,” and changes its location each day as storms develop.

He said the upper-level patterns in the atmosphere are not changing very much, causing a series of weather disturbances coming out of the plains.

“That’s giving us the extra lift each day to get storms,” he said.

Another reason for the severe weather, he said, is a source of warm, humid air coming from East and Southeast Texas and Louisiana that keeps the weather in the area hot and moist.

“Normally we may get a round of storms and then we’re done for a couple of days but we have abnormal stronger wind flow so even though we’re getting storms, and the atmosphere may use up some of that moisture, that moisture’s getting brought right back in very quickly, which is not common this time of year but in this pattern we’re in, that’s what’s happening.”