South of Zadock, Alethea and I found a clearing and watched the storm approach.
The land is pretty flat in much of this area, but trees offered a challenge to viewing. South of Zadock, Alethea and I found a clearing and watched the storm approach. It showed signs of rotation but no obvious tornado at this time – 3:37 p.m. We watched the storm go past us and tried to reposition.
Then we got on Route 57 to reposition – a tactical mistake as we headed east, given we couldn’t get off the divided highway when we DID see a tornado! We spotted it through the trees west of Bertrand, Missouri, at 5:14 p.m. Alethea caught a bit of it on video as I drove.
But the show wasn’t over yet. We moved north to pursue other storms and stopped at Morley. While I eyed a wall cloud, the storm produced a tornado south of Oran in a different part of the storm that took us by surprise. Conveniently, right in front of us. Ha! It was a very pretty, slender funnel that produced a dust whirl on the ground.
A dust spinup under the tornado.
Afterward, our attention turned to a fat rotating wall cloud moving to our northeast. Partially obscured by rain, a white tornado formed. I got shots around 6:46 p.m. CDT. The storms sped away from us, so we stopped to enjoy sunset west of Bell City, Missouri.
It was time to reposition to Tornado Alley. We made our way west through Missouri and the dark skies of the Mark Twain National Forest. We couldn’t resist stopping to try to capture the stars and possibly sprites above the storms. Instead, I caught fireflies and possibly a touch of the aurora reported that night. We also saw an eerie white shaft of light that cut across the sky. There was initial speculation the next day that it was a “STEVE” space weather phenomenon, but we learned that the effect came from a spacecraft. The upper stage of a Chinese rocket performed a fuel dump after a launch.
There’s always magic if you keep looking up.
Here’s a gallery of photos from the day. Click on any one to start a slide show of larger images.
