Tornado Watch MO/IA/IL/KS

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For parts of: Extreme Southern IA … Most of MO excluding Southeast … Western IL … Extreme Eastern KS …

Office:  TheWeatherSpace.com has issued a TORNADO WATCH effective now through midnight … This is the first official TWS Tornado Watch of the Spring 2014 Tornado Season

Issued:  3/27/2014 at 10:15am CDT

Discussion:  A cold front moving through the area today will bring severe thunderstorms with large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes.  This is the first official TWS Tornado Watch of Spring 2014 Tornado Season.

Storms are expected to form along the front at around the KS/MO border above Kansas City, MO and move eastward from there.  Directional shear suggests that storms today will have discreet supercell potential, thus upping the tornado dynamics.  Winds backing into the main front across Missouri especially, centering around the Central to Northern parts will be an area to watch as instability, low level shear, vorticity, and low level jet dynamics favor the area.  In addition to this, storms today will form a line, probably later on across the Southern half of MO which will bring mainly a damaging wind/hail threat at or after sunset.

The area is broken down into areas where the best discreet supercell potential is Central to Northern Missouri on that section of the TWS Tornado Watch, but the instability is not as strong as further South into South Central and Southern MO.  However since the directional shear is much better Columbia, MO northward, do feel this is where the best tornado potential is.

Storms should start to die as they head through the St. Louis, MO area, or at least below tornado threat limits.  Same goes for Peoria, IL … where the storms should weaken below tornado threat limits as they move eastward later in the period.