2026-04-26 REPORTS: OK/KS/MO

[Dan Robinson]

I was working a string of midnight shifts during this past week, and consequently wasn't expecting to be able to chase any of these events away from home. After a coworker graciously swapped shifts with me, I was able to get some sleep on Saturday night, go to the early church service and depart St. Louis after 11am for the first Great Plains trip of the year.

This day's setup was rather complex. Multiple outflow boundaries, two parallel warm frontal zones and a dryline-stationary front intersection were expected to provide opportunities for tornadic supercells mostly east of I-35 along the Kansas-Oklahoma border into western Missouri. Despite my late departure from St. Louis, all of these areas were within my reach, so I began the trek down Interstate 44 for a starting target of Baxter Springs, Kansas.

The primary warm front was located to my west, but a second parallel warm front was apparent on surface observations directly overhead. Soon after I arrived in Baxter Springs, thunderstorms began firing on the latter boundary directly overhead, with a nice supercell taking shape. This was producing some good negative cloud-to-ground lightning, allowing for a really nice 6,000fps high speed capture near Riverton:

This storm initially had a healthy-looking updraft base, but soon it became apparent it had crossed the boundary and gone elevated. A low ground-scraping arcus developed on the outflow that looked ominous, but was actually a harbinger of the storm's long-term cessation of tornado potential. I stayed with the storm to near Jasper, MO before breaking off and heading west to the better-looking supercell that had gone tornadic near Independence, Kansas.
I arrived on this storm at dusk near Altamont, south of Parsons. It was now a high-precipitation (HP) blob, with any visible tornado chances looking slim to none. It was producing some decent lightning, so I set up for stills as tornado sirens wailed in the distance:

I moved east after the RFD precip began catching up. At this point, multiple storms were forming to the south and merging with the supercell in its forward flank. This happened 6 or 7 times as I stopped to watch at Hallowell. There were a few bursts of negative CG lightning here, and I caught a couple of OK 6,000fps shots.
After the final merger, the storm rapidly developed a new RFD surge that overtook me here. I scrambled east to get back out ahead as new tornado warnings were issued. Lightning ahead of the storm picked up, with numerous close bolts. I stopped several times to attempt high speed shots, but all of these bolts were uncooperative in the very short intervals I had to keep ahead of the RFD. I only captured them on the dashcams. This one near Sherwin struck a power line just to my east:

Another in the field just to my west near Columbus:

The storm was continually tornado-warned from this point on, but anything would be hopelessly rain-wrapped. I decided to just call the chase and begin the drive home. I wanted to ensure I was rested for what was potentially a very big event back home the next day. I stopped one more time south of Carthage to watch this storm move over Joplin, but the good lightning had become much more sporadic and there wasn't anything else worth shooting.

I caught up to some of the earlier supercells at Waynesville, encountering some pings of what sounded like quarter-sized hail. I ended up in yet another tornado warning near Rolla for a circulation well south of the interstate that I wasn't in position to have a view on.

The drive between here and St. Louis was very difficult. I just could not get out ahead of the heavy precip cores. I finally broke free of these at Fenton, making it home at 3:30am.

 

[Brett Roberts]

I was skeptical this would even be a chase day the previous night. It looked like just the umpteenth total collapse since 2012-04-14 of a dynamic, outbreak-caliber Plains setup as forecast in the medium range.

I left OKC with a bad attitude around 2pm and made my way to Billings on I-35, where I sat for about an hour. I got restless about the viability of the true dryline play in OK by 5pm and made my way up to the KS border near Arkansas City, tempted to bite on some incipient supercells within the warm frontal zone (which would likely be grungy even if they continued intensifying). Just when I lost patience and drove through Ark City to blast NE, the first legitimate attempts on the dryline finally started to my S and SW, so I sheepishly snaked back through town like an idiot. By the time I made it back down to Ponca City around 7pm, it seemed clear that the robust updrafts right over town were the best play. So from there, it was a pretty easy chase following what would become the Osage Co. to Bartlesville supercell E on US-60 as it slowly organized.

From 7:00-7:45pm, new updrafts repeatedly developed on the southern flank of the organizing supercell and merged in with little fanfare. Only when the cell finally crossed E of OK-18 (the only paved N-S option for many miles around) did that rapidly change. By then, I was stuck playing catchup from the W using the on-and-off paved road E into Foraker, and it looked like a hook slice would be required to get back into decent position. On the plus side, an absolutely explosive updraft with a rock solid backsheared anvil was now illuminated by the setting sun from my vantage point. About 2 mi E of OK-18, I pulled over after seeing velocity look convincingly tornadic about 2 mi to my SSE, opting not to continue hook slicing blind into the path of a potential occlusion. But a couple minutes later, a tilted cone-to-stovepipe became visible dangling out the rear of the storm. I was only able to get one decent shot, an ultra-wide view that frustratingly was still not wide enough to capture the brilliantly colored updraft and anvil display (mostly above and to the left of this shot). Had this tornado persisted for even 5 minutes instead of 1, or occurred 10 minutes earlier, I'm fairly confident I would've been able to capture one of my best structure+tor shots ever... but alas.



As the storm continued E of Foraker with significant rain wrapping in the RFD, I quickly decided to quit while I was ahead, given the impending darkness. The same hook slice dilemma was still a problem if I wanted to follow the hordes E out of Foraker, and downed power lines were blocking the road S out of town, eliminating the longer S and E route to get back into the inflow sector. The storm did produce another tornado at twilight N of Pawhuska, but I was already well on my way home by then.

Despite some frustration with how close this came to presenting a wall-hanger photo op, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a visible daytime tornado out of this setup, given how far its ceiling had fallen over the preceding days. This was my first Osage Co. tornado, and honestly one of only a couple times in my 20 years that I've chased Osage Co. at all!