Despite there being a slight risk of severe weather today, I wasn’t too optimistic at the start of the day. There were tons of clouds and the temps were rather chilly. There was also a nice area of rain heading up from southern Illinois which would further stabilize the atmosphere. Not much to look forward to, or so I thought.
After picking up my paycheck from work, I ran a few errands and headed home. Not much in the way of activity in the weather department at the time. The 11:00am hazardous weather outlook from ILX even mentioned there was no threat of severe weather today. Apparently they thought the atmosphere could not destabilize given the amount of cloud cover and lower dew points.
I loaded up the radar loop from ILX and noticed a thin line of storms in western Illinois, but they didn’t look too fierce on radar. Then the moment of shock arrived when I got a notification at 1:18pm of a tornado warning for Christian and Sangamon counties. What the heck!?!? Shortly after the warning was issued, there were two reports of confirmed tornado touchdowns with the storm. Unfortunately being some 80-90 miles away, there was no way of catching up to the particular cell. However, I noticed more isolated cells to the south of here that were heading in this direction. Looking at the satellite images revealed that clouds were definitely being penetrated by the sun and that was very promising.