Mid-March hail strikes St. Joseph area
By Jared Shelton News-Press NOW meteorologist
Severe Weather Preparedness Week was recently front and center across Missouri and Kansas, during a time when skies were quiet here in the Central Plains. As if right on queue, this week was quite different, when the first severe weather event of the season materialized on Wednesday evening.
Aside from a few scattered wind damage reports, the main event for many from St. Joseph to Kansas City came in the form of sizable hail.
Around 7 p.m. Wednesday evening, storms began rapidly forming west of Kansas City along a warm front, slowly lifting northward across the area. By 8 p.m., a large supercell thunderstorm was clobbering the west and north ends of Kansas City, dropping hail ranging from 1 inch to 3 1/2 inches in diameter. For context, these chunks of ice were comparable to quarters and half dollars on the smaller end, and baseballs or even softballs on the larger end. As you can imagine, this wreaked havoc across much of the KC metro, stopping traffic, busting windshields and compromising roofs.
As the Kansas City storm raged on, a separate and smaller supercell thunderstorm blew up just to the north and west near Leavenworth. This storm moved northward and rapidly intensified as it entered Buchanan County, eventually dumping hail directly over the City of St. Joseph between 9 and 9:30 p.m.
While not as prolific as the Kansas City hail event, sizable hail was reported throughout the St. Joseph area. Local reports from the Storm Prediction Center included ping-pong-ball-sized hail near Country Club Village on the north end, golf-ball-sized hail near Benton High School on the south end, and even an isolated report of tennis-ball-sized hail near Wathena just west of Downtown.
The environment in which Wednesday’s storms formed allowed them to intensify rapidly and sustain themselves. Supercellular in structure, these storms contained strong updrafts that lofted raindrops high into the frigid atmosphere, forming ice pellets that collected layers of ice until they grew too heavy enough to overcome the vertical motion and fall to the ground. By nature, these storms were also rotating, luckily not enough to produce a tornado locally.
A similar supercell thunderstorm just west of Topeka did indeed become tornadic on Wednesday evening, with at least four separate tornado reports from Wabaunsee to Shawnee counties in Kansas. As of Thursday, the National Weather Service office in Topeka is conducting surveys to determine the strength of the suspected twisters, which seemingly skipped across rural areas damaging barns, trees and powerlines. The same thunderstorm later crossed into southern Buchanan County but had luckily weakened as rain-cooled air curtailed any tornadic activity.
Northwest Missouri was spared of life-threatening tornadoes this time around, but this will not always be the case. Aside from a reminder to have good auto and homeowners insurance, the hail that fell should also remind us to prepare for the worst and hope for the best this storm season.
