Reports of Damage, Funnel Cloud in Springfield Area Overnight

A strong line of storms moved across Southwest Missouri last night, causing approximately 2500 City Utilities customers in the Springfield area to lose power. As of 2AM, 2000 customers were still without power. KSMU’s Missy Shelton spoke with meteorologist about the storms.

Shelton: Brian Barjenbruch is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield. He joins me by phone now. There were reports of wall clouds and funnel clouds in and around Springfield last night. Do we know yet what happened?Barjenbruch: We’re sending survey crews out today. One crew is going to the Springfield area and a couple more crews are heading west of Springfield into extreme southwest Missouri, then into west central Missouri and east central Kansas.Shelton:You send crews out when you have reports from spotters, right?Barjenbruch: Right. Whenever we get reports of significant damage that may be tornadic or reports from spotters that a tornado has touched down or funnel clouds were sighted then we send out crews to see if it really was a tornado that actually touched down. A lot of times these tornadoes are coincident with significant winds like they were last night. Had some very strong winds last night in the Springfield area.Shelton: What we saw last night, was it the classic spring severe storm set up?Barjenbruch: It was a pretty good set up. We had a significant of instability and we had a slow-moving cold front. What was interesting was the way the storms evolved. We had a broken line of storms but embedded within this was a super cell structure and it tracked right over Springfield.Shelton: Have the storms moved out of the area for the foreseeable future?Barjenbruch: They have moved out for today. We may have some isolated storms over southern Missouri but today looks dry. Friday afternoon and evening, we’ll see another cold front coming through and could see the chance for severe weather again.