Good morning NBC Action Weather Bloggers,
It has been determined that tornadoes of either EF-2 or EF-3 strength touched down in the northland overnight! Here is a link to the stories...more details this afternoon.
http://www.kansascity.com/384/story/602007.html
I will be live from some of the damaged homes at 5 and 6 PM on NBC Action News as we cover the aftermath of this storm. We had almost 25,000 hits on our weather blog yesterday. We are trying to make this a valuable weather tool to get information and share information during these severe weather events.
We hope everyone made it through the night and got some sleep, eventually. That was a powerful bow echo, which we saw developing during our 10 PM weathercast last night. Bow echoes take on that shape as a result of the wind accelerating out from the thunderstorms. Look below at our ESP image from 1:47 AM:

Now, look below at the schematic diagram of wind damage produced within bow echoes. If you take the damage path associated with this picture in a case from a St. Louis bow echo on June 10, 2003, it lines up well with where we are reporting the most damage this morning, across the north side of the metro area.

It was a bit frightening last night as that line of thunderstorms moved through. Sirens went off across most of the Kansas City metro area. There were many thunderstorms, almost strong enough to produce tornadoes, with a few small tornadoes reported. If there would have been just slightly higher dewpoints, we would have likely seen some stronger tornadoes Thursday evening. Below is a picture of what apparantly was an Arby's in Independence, MO.

We are now on the south side of this storm system. Our news team is now covering the damage and aftermath of this storm. I just checked my rain gauge and the top was blown off. I will go and look for it later this morning.
Rainfall reports:
- Gardner, KS: 2.75"
- Overland Park south, KS: 1.98"
- Grandview, MO: 1.80"
- Olathe, KS (151st & Mur-Len): 1.79"
- Grain Valley, MO: 1.22"
- Lee's Summit, MO: 1.19"
- KCI airport: 1.15"
Have a great day! We will try to blog later on about next weeks severe weather potential.
Gary