August 09, 2015    

Knew there wasn't much of a chance for a tornado even though the SPC had us in a 2%, but Ryan and I still took the opportunity to go out to view the incoming storms. We saw the storms on radar coming out of the Jefferson City, Lake of the Ozarks area and headed that direction. Based on their movement, we decided to head down Highway 30 to intercept them. Our thought was that there would be an increase in intensity as the storms reached the boundary that had set up in Franklin and Jefferson County. We monitored the now line of storms coming toward us and saw nothing of note, but as we neared Cedar Hill, MO, new storm development was beginning to catch my eye out in front of the approaching line.


Took Route "B" south and had a couple new storms fire right in front of us. They were small towers at this point that had a lot of vertical to them, but no precipitation. Followed them as they developed and as we got to Hillsboro, MO, they began dumping a lot of rain. We continued east on Route "A" and observed many cells going up just in front of the quickly approaching line. Made the decision to head north on I-55, then east on I-255 across the Mississippi River into Illinois. From this point as we headed north on I-255, we just played tag with multiple storms on our trek back home. Treated to a spectacular sunlit sky through a hole in the storms at dusk. Hopefully Ryan has some better pics on his good camera.



It was a fun little backyard trip. There was plenty of cloud to ground lightning and a lot of rain. We never ran into any hail during our entire trip and we never found any storm that had any low level velocity. There were a couple that had some minor rotation in the upper levels, but never came close to posing any kind of tornadic threat. Made it home just in time to watch the final storm go through from inside my garage.

137 miles, only a few pictures, around 4 hours.


Click on the link below to see video of some of these storms.


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