2017-05-19 Reports TX/OK/KS/MO

[Todd Lemery]

Woke up in Wellington, Kansas and with all the clouds and crapvection going on, only saw two options. One was an 8 hour drive South into central Texas which wasn't going to work because we'd have to drive those 8 hours again on Saturday on the way back home to Michigan. Option two was the SW corner of Missouri. The cape was still relatively high there and the sun was shining. Set the GPS to Springfield, but delayed leaving to watch a storm coming into Wellington that just became severe warned. Got some wind and small hail before finally heading out about 11:00. Stopped to eat and fuel up in Sarcoxie Missouri when the storm approaching started to intensify.
The storm then became tornado warned and dropped a couple of tornados almost immediately. Got some cell phones pictures at highway speeds because the bowing segment with the tornados really picked up speed. The storm remained tornado warned for quite a while, but never got another glimpse of anything. Followed the storm all the way to Jefferson City, Missouri where we called it a day.
Just a note. When leaving Jefferson City in the morning, we saw a trampoline way up in a big tree. Not sure how they are going to get it back down...

 

[Dan Robinson]

The marginal-looking C KS and N TX targets required driving back southwest or northwest many more hours away from home, meaning one more overnight stop and an arrival back in St. Louis sometime Saturday afternoon. The previous day, models had also been hinting at the possibility for a couple of lead supercells to develop in the St. Louis area along the synoptic front. Although morning runs had backed off of this somewhat - the presence of the boundary, the ambient instability and the certainty of at least some storms firing near STL made the on-the-way-home option the most attractive - plus, I'd be home by late evening!

I made it ahead of the strengthening squall line at Joplin, and found myself squarely in the first tornado warning polygon of the day at Sarcoxie. These were lead mesovorticies along the gust front of a developing bow echo, very transient circulations. I positioned to watch the first one approach at Sarcoxie, with strong rising motion and weak rotation evident:



Radar showed another circulation strengthening just to the east, so I moved east on I-44 toward it. However, traffic slowed to a 35mph crawl behind a group of spooked motorists as the heavy rain overtook the highway, and I arrived too late at the apparent tornado path crossing at Stotts City where structural debris (wood, sheet metal, lumber and insulation) littered the highway and on either side. After this, I made it ahead of the gust front at Springfield, but the complex had grown more linear with no further apparent lead circulations.

I made it in plenty of time for the anticipated St. Louis area convection, which initiated south of I-44 at St. Clair. This never took off, and the bow echo to the west shrank before crossing through the city. I made it home at around 9:00PM, bringing my first Plains expedition of 2017 to a close.