Stormtrack Insider Blog – “When Weather Imitates… Art?”

Thunderstorms roared loud and proud across mid-Missouri last night in a direction to don't usually travel... from the east to the west. They were apart of a mesoscale convective system (MCS) which blossomed from a single storm that spawned near Quincy, Illinois Wednesday afternoon.

That storm complex continueed to grow and spread westward through mid-Missouri yesterday evening while out to the west near Omaha, Nebraska another MCS was quickly moving to the south east.

These two storms were quickly on a collision course with one another and an interesting thing began happening. It almost looks like our round of thunderstorms is reaching out to the approached storm to the north west.

This "reach" was actually caused by a plume of moisture that had developed a few thousand feet about the surface and a temperature boundary. As the two storms got closer, they caused that moisture to briefly rise into a line of storms before the two separate systems combined into one.

Eat your heart out, Michaelangelo!

The collision of these two storms was actually powerful enough to cause enough spin in the atmosphere to spawn a tornado! The tornado brought EF-0 wind damage near Blue Springs, Missouri which is to the southeast of Kansas City.

Infrared satellite imagery shows these two systems making the "connection" around 1:00 am this morning.