Today's Ohio Valley Storm Chase | May 16th, 2025
- Andrew Pritchard
- 6 hours ago
- 1 min read
2:30 PM UPDATE: Sitting and waiting in Cape Girardeau, MO immediately upstream from a tornadic supercell.
Waiting to see if we’ll pounce or let it cook.
I'm southbound early this afternoon with Colin Davis and Charlie Kruschek as we aim to square up an intense supercell or two across portions of southern Illinois and southeast Missouri, or perhaps adjacent portions of Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
The setup features "big cape + big flow", with the combination of deep moisture and a potent upper-level wave leading to the combination of extreme instability and favorable shear profiles for supercell thunderstorms producing big hail, damaging wind gusts, and a few tornadoes.
We've got Sikeston, Missouri in our GPS right now, but the main objective for the day will be to analyze the upstream environment and approaching storms in an effort to put ourselves in front of a storm with an ongoing or imminent tornado in the favorable terrain along the I-55 corridor through the Mississippi River Delta region.
Updates here through the day!