Looking at the setup,
the tornado potential was quite low, so my intent
was to sit this day out. Around 4:15pm, I
get a text from our chase partner Brian Stertz
stating that he thinks the storm forming in Phelps
County, Missouri is a storm we should latch
onto. Well, the short story is, 10 minutes
later, I was on the road headed to pick up Ryan as
he got off of work and then we worked our way down
to southeast Missouri for a potential storm
intercept.
With a rushed, late start, it was
going to be a close call to be able to intercept
the storm as it moved east-southeast. Our
goal was to get to the storm before it got east
of the Interstate 55. We saw on radar
there were two storms of interest. One
being much further down in the Cape Girardeau
area and the one we were after that would cross
south of the Perryville, Missouri area.
Although the one further south had the better
supercell characteristics with a better wind
velocity signature, our storm also had the same
look, although a bit weaker. After a needed fuel
stop in Festus, Missouri, we continued our quest
of catching up to the storm that was working
its way east-southeastward. The
precipitation from our storm was already over
the Interstate as we got to it, but the back end
was still west of the highway. As we
drove through the rain in our attempt to get to
the front of the precipitation and have a view
of the back end of the storm to the west, the
more the storm was losing its supercell look and
looking more like a bow echo
situation. Passing through the rain,
we drove through the first of many hail cores we
would encounter today, this hail being mostly ½"
size.
When we finally made it to the front edge of the
rain and hail and could see the brightening
skies, Ryan says "our storm now has a tornado
warning". WHAT?!?! Sure enough,
there was a kink in the bow echo just a couple
miles to our east-northeast. We were
coming up to Highway "KK" and figuring at this
point this may be the only tornado opportunity
we have today since the supercell
characteristics were all but gone, we made the
decision to battle the backroads east and make
an attempt at getting a glimpse into the notch
of the bow echo.
We traveled east and then took some
more backroads south, southeast, east on some
paved roads, some rock roads, but we were never
able to get into a good position to have a look
into the notch of the storm even though we were
within one mile of that business part of the
storm. We could see the darkened area, but
the rain was hiding the view. As we ran
out of road near the Mississippi River, the
storm carried on east and we were once again
blasted by the rain and hail. This time
the hail was slightly bigger around this feature
to our east. Mostly ½" hail,
but some as big as 1". As the rain and
hail passed, we were treated to a very nice
rainbow.
We made a loop back to the
north and eventually back west to get back
to I-55. On the way, we stopped for a
few pictures of the sunset and backside of
the storm.
As we drove on, we also
noticed how the back end of this storm had
almost continuous lightning. There was
spark after spark 1-2 seconds apart.
We stopped to take a few pictures of
lightning as daylight was turning to dusk.
There was still one more
storm coming at us from the northwest.
As we hit Highway "61", we drove south to
Highway "E" which took us back out to
I-55. Decided at this point to make a
play on the storm coming toward us from the
northwest. Daylight had now turned to
darkness, so our goal this time was to find
some cover out ahead of this now Severe
Warned Storm and make a play on the best of
its hail core. To do this, we needed
to go south. We lined the hail core up
in the city of Jackson, Missouri.
We worked our way west into
Jackson and as it began to hail, took cover
under a gas station awning on the west side
of Jackson, but the hail size never exceeded
¾"
during this round. Although there
was hail, the big story in Jackson was
the amount of rain. Roads were
covered from the extreme amount of water
making traveling much more difficult
maneuvering through the rushing water
and standing water. Certainly
criteria for the Flash Flood Warning
that was issued for the area.
We worked our way back to the
Interstate for the trip home as the rain and
hail was coming to an end. Once again
we were noticing the enormous amount of
lightning as we looked at the storm behind
us. We once again pulled off of the
Highway and took some more pictures of the
nearly continuous lightning.
After having
2 back to back trips of not even seeing a
severe storm, it was a needed change to see
Severe Thunderstorms again with the bonus of
getting within a mile or two of the only
Missouri Tornado Warning today. With the
many different aspects of the storm with the
Tornado Warning, Hail, Lightning, and Flash
Flooding with even a full arc rainbow thrown
in made this trip very enjoyable.
6.5 Hours
* Total
Miles - 276
|
Click
on the link below to see video of some
of these storms.
|
April 08,
2020 
