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Im right on the fringe of one, I can see it coming. But wait, now its too dark wich just makes it scarier.

On my way home from work at 9pm.  Left 87th and I-35 it was 90 degrees.  By the time I hit 635 North it had dropped to 74!  It stayed at 74 untill I hit the train yard at Kansas Avenue then it started climbing again to 85 by I-70, and back to 90 by Leavenworth Road.  Talk about a "cooling off"!!  

Maybe I should go out and mow since it's the coolest it will be all week :)  If you are a fan of "odd" weather you have to be loving this setup!

I live at 72nd and Ward Parkway and we got a sudden rain with high enough winds that a few twigs blew out of the tree in my backyard.  It did not last long, but produced 2/10 of an inch of rain.  It was definitely cooler after the rain blew through.b

Outflow in Lenexa!
Temp and dewpoint dropping!
Praise The Lord!!!!!

Jeremy,

Here in Hiawatha I think the outflow boundry just went thru.  At 9pm there was no wind and very humid but about 15 - 20 minutes ago the wind came up and and it's now cool and the temp is down to 80 degress with very little humidity.   I wish it wasn't dark, I would get out an mow the yard!!!

I think a microburst came through Mission. It was fascinating because I could actually see the wind coming at us as it swept through the trees. I feel bad for the people who lost their power though...not a time when I would want to be without air conditioning!

Not in the rain, but in the inflow/outflow whatever.  It is so nice and cool here in SE LEavenworth Co.  Humidity is way down and I get a nice light show before bed.  Compared to last night on the porch, this is awesome.  Probably no rain.  No wind.  I can just feel the humidity falling.

Oh thank the Lord above for the outflow.

I should get some pictures of the damage around here. Trees have been snapped from that tornado touchdown or near 1 I swear I saw. It scared the crap out me!

At least juba believs me. i had my camera in my hands just moments before too! :(

Zach Kumke,
Kumke Weather Services ™

With all due respect to the good intentions on the news, the story that ran tonight on the closed pools on Mondays, etc. finished up with the reminder to see a complete list of libraries etc., places to cool off.. "For a complete list of places to cool off, see our website, NBCactionews.com." Methinks this falls on deaf ears for those suffering. Perhaps a more useful thing to say to close the story might be big graphics for perhaps the American Red Cross, or 911, or whatever might be the most immediate and appropriate to those not already sitting in air conditioning with access to the internet. Just my two cents!!

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I hear ya, we talked about this same thing today.

Jeremy

From Lawrence I can see the tops of some thunderstorms (ESE) and the lightning looks amazing from this distance!

JEREMY>>>> That was awsome video especially in HD!! That is amazing that you caught that on video. Like I said earlier since Gary is out of town you are just having fun being in charge of the weather...LOL.... How did you make that microburst happen... Have a good night and hopefully tommorrow night will not be a long one for you!!
ED

I saw a cell that formed just to the east of me....hope no microburst though....
becky

ok, now that blew up quick over me here in parkville...according to the radar it should be raining its butt off but its not.  Lots of lightning and thunder...
becky

The tornado was very hard to see in the blinding rains, but Im very sure it was there. All of the sudden, All I saw was a sudden, and very sudden little lowering that was twisting like crazy and then it started spinning very very fast and boom a tornado hit the ground and was back up all this happening in less than probably 30 seconds. It was like a brief spin up of much rain. It felt bad when I was in a trailer house Id share what I said when i first saw it but its would be banned from the blog

    Kumke, at first I thought you might've seen a roll cloud but the storm was just so tiny it didn't seem possilbe to me, but there is still a chance. Its nice to see that there aren't so many athiests, even if you aren't Christian, I still think having a religion is better than having none. They are all so similar, just different names for things and worshiping techiques, think about it! Im surprised to still see lightning.

HERES THE RAIN!!! WOW!!!

very strange, according to radar, here in Odessa, it should be raining cats and dogs, but just a light mist.  I am wondering if the updrafts are strong enough at the onset to keep the rain up high.

Nice gust front to cool things off 20 degrees and some welcome and unexpected rain and thunder! Grain Valley.

Jeremy if that microburst happenned around 8PM or so I have some great photo's of a storm cloud I took from here in McLouth.  I emailed them to you.  It had to have a top on it in excess of 50,000 it was huge.

wow.  I will need some time to process this one.

flake-
I have the same thing here just to the south of Odessa. Weird isn't it. Never heard of such a thing!

Ought Oh

The tornado alley radar appears to indicate that the rain and thunderstorms North of Kansas City are moving south ... it looks like Overland Park and Olathe will be getting some major rain???

Gee you guys down there have some weather, just looked at the radar.  Just missing us here in McLouth by about 3 miles.

So...I am still confused. It looks to me like this thing isn't really moving, but just filling in to the SW?  Is that correct? Beyond the microbursts is there any severe threat? And how long do we think this will last?

Of all the times to be out of town!  Sure hope everyone is safe and survived the "burst" in Liberty.

ended up with .08" in Kearney.

Interesting.  A gust front that stretches from Chicago thru St. Louis to Kansas City and then back up into easter Nebraska!  600 miles of rain cooled air rushing out in a giant semi-circle.
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php

This should really throw a wrench into the forcasts for the next few days...especially the heat advisories.

Report from sedalia: numerous trees are down around sedalia with some power outages. winds were really not as strong as a week ago's storms

I doubt this will make much of a difference personally. Maybe tomorrow a little??? I still expect the warm air to win out tomorrow.

If anything... you guessed it! More humidity! yay! LOL

Outflow boundaries for tomorrow from this stuff tonight??? huh huh? Kcwxguy? Anybody. Maybe, just maybe.

That microburst video earlier was amazing. This cool-off is even more so.

Though tomorrow, I'll be down at the lake and it'll be just as hot and humid again. Oh well, at least this is a break tonight.

OK, gang...yes, this is weird, just got the gust front about 15 min ago south of Pleasant Hill. Varying directions. Why is it that nobody was talking about the potential for this type of weather this morning? Is it just because the heat was the topic of the day? When I saw the dew points this morning, I was thinking that something was sure to fire up tonight. I know, I know...armchair quarterbacking and all. Just curious, not critical. But was this a surprise?

Mammatus - if we weren't in the middle of a ridge...I would ponder that..  The only potential for anything is after mid day heating on any remnant boundaries..but it would be the same type of thing as tonight with little storms forming, then collapsing.  Only closer to the actual frontal boundary would it be more interesting.

Northern Iowa should be the place to watch tomorrow.

MikeB - the events that transpired this evening/tonight were microscale elements.  It was a very small gravity wave that triggered convergence for the collapsing thunderstorms, and in turn, it provided a bit of a path for the IA/N. Mo complex to backbuild along the outflow boundary.

This type of thing is impossible for models to pick up.

This is weird! Was this at all forecasted as a possibility?? I missed the news segments today.

We missed the storms but saw tons of lightning @ 55th and Pflumm.
Temperature went from 90 to 73 within less than two hours, after hitting 101 earlier this afternoon.

a very nice 71 degrees in st jo this morning. good dog walking weather

Its soo nice outside, its chilly! It helped fix my sunburn, I NEVER burn. I loved the storms last night, so windy and cool and rainny. It was an impressive outflowl

.78" of rain in Raytown.  Lots of lightning and gusty winds, but nothing severe.  

So I'm thinking. . . maybe it was a microburst that hit the Blue Springs/Lee's Summit area early Monday morning.  To bad we don't have video to prove it. . . Whatever it was, it snapped our 8 year old Bradford Pear tree and downed many limbs/trees in our area.  Our house was without power from 6AM until 6PM.  It was way too hot to be without air conditioning!!

TWC only forecast 100 degrees a few times a year, only in late July or August, never in June. Why would they think we could get that hot when they think 97 for KC? Last night the thunderstorm over gardener was really strange, seeing it on the radar it looked like a blip.

Hi Jeremy,  I just checked my gauge and it held .98" from last nights storm.  I knew it rained but didn't know it rained that much!

Laura n' Raytown
Station Number :   MO-JC-12
Station Name :       Raytown 2.0 N

There was a lot to be thankful for in last nights storm.  Things could have been so much worse!  I sure hope no one was hurt in last night's event in Liberty.  I'm counting my blessings this morning!  My garden enjoyed the 3/4 inch of rain...or it will once the plants stand up from being beaten to the ground!

rain

Weather team -
In looking back at the LRC i dont see anything that reflects on the early heat wave we are currently experiencing.  Was this somehting that you forecasted with the LRC and I missed or is this a blip on the radar and we will return to normal temperatures soon.  I have been in KC all of my life and dont recall many June months with a heat stretch that were in right now.  What lies ahead for late July and August when we typically wee the hottest temps of the season?

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Somewhat of a blip.  I would look at the LRC blog...I know Gary did a post there a few days ago.  The storm this weekend should bring us back to the 80s for highs and rop the dew points.

jeremy

Another surprise storm last night around 10:30, thankfully, I've had a couple of rains this week to keep the grass green despite the extreme heat...checked my CoCoRahs station here in SW Grain Valley...monthly total up to 6.77. Wonder what today will bring?

Jeff

Tawn00 - being the owner of several Bradford Pears [since removed] with a couple different properties, I have found that a powerful sneeze will cause damage to that breed.  

Summertime will bring more wind events even with very isolated cells.  Because many popup or otherwise storms will be largely instability fueled, they cannot sustain long periods of times due to minimal upper air support and shear.  As all that instability rushes into the core of the storm, it cannot hold it..and thus you have these storms collapsing sending out a rush of outflow.  

Yesterday was a great example of summer time behavior, albeit many types on the same night!  We first had a stray gravity wave set up shop from SW to NE over/near KC which provided the needed convergence for the Liberty cell.  Once it fell off the wave, it collapsed.  Then, we see the complex in IA dive almost due south throwing a huge outflow as the entire complex began to collapse.

As that outflow began to come toward KC, it killed the cell in OP that had formed on the gravity wave and it too collapsed sending out a strong outflow.  The cell in Gardner was far enough SW not to get greatly affected by the complex outflows coming from the NE...but, affected enough not to move at all, thus dumping copious rain over a very small area.

Once the outflow grew into this area from the NE, it was able to maximize the remaining large instability and no cap to fire up storms in the wake of the outflow and killing the Gardner storm in short order.

Last night, we saw how just even a micro feature of a gravity wave was enough to provide focus for thunderstorm development, we saw how outflows can reek havoc on a forecast, and we saw a HUGE outflow from the collapsing complex in IA/NO. MO interact and create its own environment.

These storm related entities are nearly impossible to forecast.  Especially when those types of activities are going on within a deep upper level ridge.  It is almost counter intuitive for that to happen.  

Goes to show that with this much instability available, any type of focusing mechanism can have storms pop up in a hurry and collapse just as fast.

JOCOMike - I will oversimplify [due to time] an answer to your question, but hopefully give enough to think about.  If you think about this year's LRC, there are several pattern traits that are evident.  The first and largest entities are the Hudson Bay vortex [troughing over the Mississippi Valley], and the Western troughing/split flow.  As the cycle is about 60 days, each of these patterns are about 20 days each.  This leaves a remaining 20 days for the transition time in and out of each of the major setups.

As the transition goes from one to another, we end up with a trough/ridge/trough movement as the energy relocates.  We have seen this allignment/movement since October.  Seasonal relationships will have an impact on how it affects the surface.  In wintertime, a ridging over the Plain states can mean something completely different than in the Summertime.

If you go back and look at the third into the fourth week of April, February, and December at the surface temperature anomalies for KMCI, you see a warming trend each time.

Here is what I mean...

June 21-23 [so far], about 10 degrees above mean.
April 22-26th - 12.4 degrees above mean
February 23-26th - 7.3 degrees above mean
December 26-30th - 13 degrees above mean

Summertime use of the LRC is even harder to do as it is fading away.  I think there is still some utility, but it is diminishing daily as the pattern weakens so much it is hard to see anymore.  Also, as the heights rise, any view at the 500mb level become too faint to recognize in this area, and most of the lower 48 states.

You can still see the pattern in Canada as the heights are still a bit lower there, but translating that to sensible weather trends for us in KC are nearly impossible using the LRC for Summer...but it is something we all continue to work on and develop based on new observations.

Thanks KCWXGuy...great analysis of yesterday afternoon and evening's weather! :-)Do you have any thoughts on today's set up...sounds like things are extremely difficult to pinpoint though.

Jeff

Amazing to see the outflow maintained by the convection it fired off last night. Even more interesting to see it maintained all the way to Chicago. I'll need to look into WHY this happened.

Every one of the storms through the evening had a VERY defined outflow signature on radar. Here's the Liberty cell.  http://twitpic.com/88i11
The outflow from this cell hit the outflow from a cell south of Lawrence and helped bubbled up the storm that created the microburst in Merriam/KCK. (BTW. Microbursts are a LOT more common than you let on Jeremy. Catching it on video is rare. :) )

The LRC DID maintain a ridge across the central part of the country, but it was weak enough to allow some storms to progress through the dominant mean ridge in past cycles.

Does not having much sunshine today lower the risk for bad storms later on?  Or is there enough heat built up without the sun so it doesn't make a difference?

Scott. What evidence do you have of it being a gravity wave set up over the city? I don't believe it was.

It's still delightfully pleasant right now. Could this thing or whatever it was last night possibly have affected the pattern we were expecting and shortened the brute heat by one day?

The videos of the microbursts were really interesting! It is amazing to see the rain cooled air just fall out of the clouds. Watching the videos you can really see why the winds are produced. Thanks for sharing NBC!

Wish I could get a buck for every second the weather changes around here.

Grrr...Ed...you are going to make me find the IR loop.  It was faint, but in/around the 20-21z hours, you can see a ripple propagating NW from SW MO, stalling out in this area.

I will try to find it.  

I was just out and observed N winds from calm/10 kts.  I am thinking this may challenge the high temperatures today.  Granted, mixing should take care of it..but will it do it fast enough?  Maybe 92-94 degrees today?  Dunno..have to do some more surface analysis.

Nights like last night completely wreck forecasts, and not having a clear indication of air flow makes things very difficult to forecast.

I must say that it was pretty funny at the beginning of NBC Action New Midday when the bar at the bottom says, "Microburst Touch Down!"

In a way it does when the air is almost literally dropped right out of the storm and spreads out (I won't go into details as many have; no need to take up more space, even though putting this in parenthesis takes more space and saying it's in parenthesis and it's wasting space wastes more space), but that was a first in terms of wording I must say.

kcwxguy said: Maybe 92-94 degrees today?  Dunno..have to do some more surface analysis.
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Oh thank you. I need to make decisions based upon expected Temps.

Arghhhhhhhh! I was expecting 90's yesterday morning at 9:00 PM not the 70's.

Okay,  everywhere I look it appears everyone is gambling on 98 today.

Guess I better just take it or leave it.

I believe there was a gravity wave yesterday that caused the storms to ignite in the afternoon.  I saw it on the IR loop and just thought it was just a remnant outflow boundary. There were storms that fired in southeast Missouri around 3pm and may have caused that weak wave to move north.

I wish I could of got some pictures of the gust front that rolled through Marceline, MO yesterday...very cool looking! I would say the winds were blowing 45 to 50 mph. I was at the lake fishing as the gust front went through, and it the water straight to the dam of the resevoir with about 3 foot waves.

As the storm came through, there wasnt the increrdible amount of lightning we have been seeing, but most of the lightning was cloud to ground. It did have some very heavy rain as I drove through town, the air was a brownish grey color and the rain was dumping down in sheets.

The storm seemed like it lasted forever as it just kept lightning, raining, and the wind kept blowing. The power was out at my house off for like 3 hours, and with this towns crappy electrical system, it came on and off several times, even this morning it went off and on.

Well we needed it here and it cooled thing off nicely,

Alex in Marceline

    Last I checked TWC forecasted 100 for Thursday and Saturday now, and my computer forecastes 100 for saturday now, JEREMEY GET RID OF THE HEAT, ITS BEEN HERE PLANTY LONG! ;-) I would rather die of cold than heat, if I had a choice. But please define what is a gravity wave?
    Latest temp. at Johnson County Executive 94 degrees actuall air temperature, not in the sun temperature. Yesterdeay morning in the sun the temperature reached 106 degrees! Ouch! We had an air temperature high of 102 yesterday.

Plz more rain:

. . . . .IT IS POSSIBLE THAT TEMPERATURES AND HEAT INDICIES WILL BE A LITTLE COOLER ON THURSDAY. TEMPERATURES ARE DEPENDENT UPON THE STRENGTH OF A COLD FRONT WHICH WILL LIKELY INITIATE THUNDERSTORMS OVER NORTHERN MISSOURI TONIGHT. IF A COMPLEX OF STORMS DEVELOP... A THUNDERSTORM OUTFLOW BOUNDARY MAY KEEP TEMPERATURES FROM BEING AS HOT AS THE CURRENT FORECAST. . . . .

And plz don't let this be neccesary:

. . . . .IT IS POSSIBLE THAT VERY WARM AND HUMID CONDITIONS WILL PERSIST INTO FRIDAY AND EVEN SATURDAY. THIS MAY NECESSITATE A CONTINUATION OF THE EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING INTO THE WEEKEND. . . . .

Yes, Juba, I would like to understand more about the gravity wave too.  I can understand the outflow boundry, but what is a gravity wave, how does it form and where did it come from?
I got over an inch of rain too, my garden loved it!  Tho  it did beat up the lettuce a little bit.
Thanks

MrSteve - ha.  I can understand needing specific information for business needs, after all this is what we do at lrcweather.com

;-)

MD just to our South...Doesn't sound like a big deal.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/md/md1301.html

It is 86 at KMCI...this team is going for 96 per the forecast graphic.

Still caught a bit in the remnant outflow, though it is starting to mix out.  Still some convection in NW MO.

Winds are calm.  Flow from the SW is light and has low 90s down to the OK state line.  Several more hours of sunlight available, but max heating will be around 4PM.

Looking at satellite, there is yet another outflow boundary heading south from the convection in NE/IA.  Upper 90s doesn't seem likely to me.  Mid 90s a stretch, but possible.  Lower 90s most probable.

Then again, these are just my obs...

And...Ed was right earlier.  I was wrong in noting the convergence last night as a gravity wave.  From my first look at it, trying to squint from a regional view to see what it was, it looked like that, but upon further analysis...I was wrong.

It was a boundary.  Here is a little movie I put together showing the setup yesterday and some of the events.

http://tinyurl.com/m2c3o7

Speaking of gravity waves. I threw a few radar frames of the waves moving through KC earlier.
http://twitpic.com/8am73

What the heck is going on?????

Springfield, MO 13:52 Fair 91ºF 71ºF 52% N 15 G 69 mph 29.97 in

69mph gust?  From the north?  This outflow is not done.

Microburst NE of Joplin...

Storms are rapidly developing in southeast nebraska and moving southeast!!!!!

I just noticed explosive development at the Lake of the Ozarks most recently and up in far SE Nebraska there's a severe thunderstorm warning.

I must say that these storms are very hard to understand! Going to be a fun afternoon! =)

New storm on the Linn county/ Miami county line too...

Weather team... No update today, with storms firing up to our north and heading this way?

New blog

Are we having fun yet?  I haven't quite seen anything like this before, in its duration or totality.  

They should issue microburst watches!!!!