Monday - May 24, 2004 - Northwest Missouri Tornadoes

My decision to make another long run north was based mostly off of one piece of data. The 24 hour forecast sounding at Kansas City for 00z. This was going to be a day where there would be rapid changes in the weather during the 8 to 12 hours leading up to the event. I usually don’t expect an “outbreak” of severe weather unless the moisture and instability are in place a day or so in advance. But... if the forecast sounding for Kansas City came anywhere close to verifying... I wanted to be there.

Rick Schulze made the drive with me and we left Okarche at 7 a.m. The first thing that went right on the day... actually leaving when we said we would the night before. We drove to Lawrence, KS and pretty much had trouble getting data the entire way. So... to make things easier, we stopped and I just asked where the tornadoes were going to be.

We left northbound out of Lawrence knowing that we could reach the supercells forming near Falls City, NE if we needed to... but keeping an eye on the numerous TCU/CB’s that were forming in our area of northeast Kansas. The move northbound continued until we were just a few miles from Falls City when the first tornado warning was issued for the storm. We followed the storm east through Rulo, NE and into Missouri. Only my second time ever to chase in Missouri. Between Rulo and Bigelow, MO the storm really tried hard to produce. At times... wall cloud rotation was fairly strong. We didn’t end up seeing any tornadoes at this point and the storm started to look a little ragged as several smaller storms continued to smash into the south side of our target storm. With each merger... there was a big precipitation dump somewhere around our mesocyclone. The storm that I believe wanted to be on the classic side of things... would go through a period of looking HP before the meso would be able to expose itself again.

The steady merger of smaller cells seemed to have a negative impact on our storm for about two hours before the updraft/meso became strong enough to say “I’m going to produce tornadoes anyway”. From the area south of Stanberry and west of Darlington... a giant wall cloud with very strong rotation developed. Another view. Several vortices were evident and we had the start of what would be a large and strong looking tornado that had some intense motions. This tornado would be on the ground for about 23 minutes and travel about eight miles. Here is another image of one of the vortices. Another image. Most would last for no longer than 10 to 20 seconds. This rather large vortex formed and produced extensive tree damage about 1/2 mile from us. Funky vortex. Tornado approaching Albany.

While we were driving toward Albany... we noticed another lowering very close to the north side of the town. It didn’t appear to have anything with it... and we were keeping a closer eye on our tornado just southwest of the town. We made note of the lowering and then moved south of Albany to check for damage where our original tornado looked to have weakened. Our road ended up being blocked by “weak” damage /trees, power poles down - minor damage to homes/.

With a blocked road south of town... we headed back into Albany to catch the east/west highway 136. We were more than surprised to find major damage on the north end of the town... that I believe was associated with the lowering that we noted earlier. You know something happened when you turn the corner and start seeing the “bottoms” of cars. Damage. Damage. I had to get out and move some debris before we were able to continue east. Most of the vehicles that were overturned did not appear to have anyone in them when the tornado hit... except for one that was overturned with it’s lights on. We found the driver who didn’t need any attention and then continued east toward New Hampton and Bethany.

Our next tornado would be a smaller, 10 minute tornado just west and northwest of Bethany. Another picture. Here we are looking up/west at the remaining funnel as it moved toward the northwest side of Bethany. Another view. We never saw any ground rotation with this.

The storm was able to produce one more small tornado near the town of Mount Moriah.

Doug Speheger was giving my reports to the National Weather Service in Pleasant Hill. I hated to see the damage in Albany... but I had hoped that my report that a large tornado was west of Albany and headed toward the town helped.