Always
an extra treat when you get a summertime
Tornadic Storm opportunity, so when that chance
came, my son Ryan and I decided to give it a
try. The setup and location of potential
tornadic activity leading up to the day was in
question, but on the morning of, the target
seemed to lock in and remain consistent.
We put our hopes in the HRRR model that run
after run all morning, pointed to the
Missouri/Arkansas Border in Southeast,
Missouri/Northeast Arkansas. We left
after Ryan got off of work at 12:00 noon.
As we got near the border, we decided, with the
input of Brian Stertz, that the holding spot
should be somewhere near Jonesboro,
Arkansas. We discovered that there was
zero data and sometimes even no phone or text
service once you got off of the main interstate
down in Northeast Arkansas. That meant
most of our day was running only on visuals.
As we neared Jonesboro, we
stopped for a fuel fill-up just east of
Jonesboro in Lake City, Arkansas. This
was the first time since leaving the
interstate that we had a phone signal to pull
up some current radar images. We saw
that things had progressed more east than we
had anticipated. There were several
areas to choose from. One was an area to
the southeast of us that had severe storm
warnings and actually already had a tornado
warning in East Central Arkansas ready to move
into Mississippi. There were several
individual cells just to our north that were
small and not severe warned. A bit
further to the North-Northwest of that, there
was a line of storms in Missouri with the tail
end just inside of the Arkansas border moving
east just as the HRRR had
predicted. That cell on the end of
the line seemed to have the most hope not only
for the look on radar, but remembering that
the HRRR consistently had that cell strong
through the Boot Heel on the morning model
runs, so our decision was to turn back around
head back toward I-55 and intercept that storm
as it entered the Missouri Boot Heel.
Getting
back to the Interstate again, we once again
regained phone data and were feeling very
defeated as we saw nothing on radar that gave
any hope for a severe storm, much less a
tornadic cell. Looking
at the severe parameters, Ryan informs me
that the best storm parameters are now to
the south and southeast of us and out of
our range. At that point, the word
"bust" was heard in the car. We, at that point, gave up any
hope for the day. We continued north
with the idea that we'd watch the tail-end
storm on the line cross I-55 in front of us
and then head home.
Not
more than a minute after declaring the day was a
bust and we would be heading back home, Ryan
shouts out "there is a tornado warning just to
the west of us". Sure enough, 25 miles due
west. We exited the Interstate at the next
exit and began working our way back toward the
warned storm. We drove west, then needed
to move south to gain a
clear view underneath the storm
base. Lots of lowerings and cloud
action, but no sign of a tornado. Radio
reports were coming in that a tornado had been
firmly on the ground for 10 minutes, but had
not lifted. Well, just great!
We're unsure, but we believe that this tornado
was produced by one of the decrete, small
cells we were looking at just to the north
when we were in Lake City at the gas
station.
August 20, 2018 
