15/04/2023
**UPDATE: The severe threat has ended. Cooler temperatures and light rain will follow tonight! May want to bundle up!**
Severe thunderstorms are on the books for this afternoon into this evening, now is the time to prepare!
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What you need to know:
Storms are likely for much of the state, with severe weather expected across Central, Southern, and Eastern MO. All hazards are possible, but winds in excess of 75 mph and hail upwards of baseball size are the primary concern. Make sure you have a way to get warnings!
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The Details:
Storms will rapidly develop across portions of Western Missouri in an arc of semi-discrete supercells. As they track east, more development is expected as the storms congeal into a squall line with embedded supercells. In the early stages across Western and Central MO the highest potential will be very large hail, I wouldn't be surprised to see several reports of baseball-sized hail or larger. As the storms move east, some question remains about how quickly they will become a line, if the process happens slower then the chance for tornadoes increases as the best environment is across Central and Eastern MO. If the process happens faster, we will see the tornado probability decline but the damaging wind risks will increase. What's concerning about this setup, is typically when severe storms turn linear (or QLCS) the hail threat rapidly declines. However, the environment is primed in a way that I expect it to contain damaging winds 60-80 mph while potentially dropping very large hail 2"+. This would be a rather dangerous combination as wind-driven hail poses a much higher threat to home damage and life. As the storms move east, there is good agreement it will be entirely a QLCS threat as it moved towards the STL region, which again is good for the tornado threat but it will still contain large hail and damaging winds. It should not be ignored, that with the best environment being contained in Eastern MO spin-up tornadoes are possible even with the storms becoming more linear.
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