March-April 2026 Storm Chasing Recap

I went to bed Tuesday night not planning to do anything with the weather on Wednesday. The all-day messy thunderstorms in fog and low clouds would likely not offer much worth shooting, so I figured I'd just go outside at home or work to watch any of them that passed nearby. When I awoke at 1PM, a few storms to the southwest were heading into what looked like a not-too-shabby environment along a warm front positioned roughly from Sparta to Pinckneyville. The sun had been poking through down there, and the surface winds were backed nicely along and just north of the boundary. I thought it looked worthy of going a county or so to the south to see what this might do, so I headed down through Venedy to Coulterville to get ahead of the first potential supercell. Alas, a strong outflow was already racing ahead of the storm here, with a few new cells just south of Pinckneyville looking to possibly take over southeast of the outflow.

When I finally got in position on these new storms at Benton, I found the outflow was already 5 miles ahead of them. The only other play was isolated cells to the southeast heading for a river crossing into Kentucky. I'd need to drive almost 2 hours to get into position on these via Harrisburg and the Ohio River bridge at Shawneetown, and it didn't look like I'd make it in time. After a few radar scans of these cells still struggling, it was apparent that effort would not be worth it. I hadn't even planned to drive this far today as it was. I turned around and headed back home to seal the bust, after seeing a few distant lightning strikes but nothing of any photogenic value. No cameras touched this day.

Later that night, continuous thunderstorms traversed the St. Louis metro area for several hours - but all of it was obscured by dense fog. The Arch webcams showed this fog layer was very shallow, maybe 200 feet high, with the tops of taller buildings downtown (and the Arch itself) in clear air above it. I went out once near Shiloh during my lunch break at 8:30PM in the hopes that a stronger cell passing overhead would produce enough wind to mix out the paper-thin fog layer, but that didn't happen.

As distant thunder continued to roll as it had been doing all day on Wednesday, I walked outside at 2AM to take another look at the conditions. The thick fog from earlier was gone, and I could actually see lightning in a storm to the distant south. The stratiform precip of thunderstorms 70 miles to the south was overhead and producing a flash or two evey 5 minutes or so, so I took the high speed camera down the road to my typical viewing spot for about an hour. No lightning channels exited the clouds. After the storm moved east of due south, I was done with it - I'd have to start facing the wind-blown rain to keep shooting.

As the expected two-day severe weather episode on Thursday and Friday (March 5 and 6) neared, I became less enthusiastic about both of them for chase prospects. The main shortwave trough ejection on Friday was shown as the bigger event, with a tornado risk from Texas to Iowa, centered on eastern Kansas and Western Missouri. Thursday's event showed some potential, too.

By Wednesday evening, models mostly agreed that the zone of Thursday's target would be from Amarillo to Oklahoma City. This "day before the day" setup appeared quite nice on paper, with everything needed for supercell tornadoes. The main caveat was that most models didn't fire storms until after sunset. A likely nighttime event with a 12-hour drive (one way) was off the table for me, so I just focused on Friday.

As Friday's "main event" neared, it too was losing a lot of its earlier luster in model depictions. The "shortwave" for this event (a smaller wave embedded in the larger jet pattern) was shown by all but one model to be in a configuration that favored an early squall line (see Stormtrack's event thread for this day for the details on that). Furthermore, the broad warm sector and wide belt of fast upper level flow meant a tornado risk would also be present across a vast area in nearly the entire Midwest region, even up into Michigan. Models suggested supercells could form from Columbia to Hannibal, mostly west of St. Louis - but within a 2-hour drive.

In the 24 hours before this event, model depictions were hodgepodge and not in good agreement of where the best areas would be. The morning didn't bring any clarity to that picture. What I did see was that the day appeared on course to be messy and likely not worth driving more than a couple of hours for. By noon I was committed to staying in my "home area" (for me, that's roughly a 2.5 hour's drive radius). I headed to my starting target of Foristell, Missouri.

As the afternoon wore on, visible satellite revealed many cumulus fields across Missouri and Illinois that could eventually become thunderstorms. It was a roll of the dice of where to go, until I noticed the surface winds in central Missouri veering to the southwest, while winds along the Mississippi River and Illinois were still southerly and even slightly backed to the southeast. This indicated an area of low-level convergence had developed roughly from Foristell through around Jacksonville, Illinois, and this area would likely be where storms would develop. I headed up to Bowling Green, MO as storms began firing all around the convergence zone.

I moved across the river up to Pittsfield as this activity struggled to take off. A few of the cells managed some lightning strikes, but not much else. The updrafts were high-based and the storms quickly became outflow dominant. A gust front eventually developed and pushed far to the southeast, ending the tornado threat in this entire cluster.

With the chase mostly over, I stopped in Jacksonville for dinner. Back on the road, I stayed with a few new cells that had formed behind the gust front along I-72 southwest of Springfield, hoping for a few lightning strikes while the setting sun peeked through the rain shafts to the west near New Berlin. This is the only time I picked up a camera during the chase:

The lightning didn't happen. All of these cells slowly faded along with the daylight, so I was home by 7:30pm.

A wild chase day just south of Chicagoland in northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana. This event has its own page here with more photos and a detailed log.

I had low expectations for this event, so I didn't do much other than watch the line come into downtown St. Louis, then stayed just ahead of it a short distance to the east of home. The main limiting factor for this event was paltry instability thanks to all-day cloud cover. The primary subject then was mesovortex tornadoes spinning up on the leading edge of a severe squall line, should any of the line's updrafts manage to nose out ahead of the plowing cold front. Radar showed that these circulations were plentiful, each triggering constant tornado warnings through and beyond the metro area. While some of these displayed classic features like RFD clear slots, motion at cloud base was very weak. I also did not see a single power flash from my aerial vantage point as this line moved across the dense urban core of the city.

The best-looking meso/clear slot, looking northwest toward the airport:

Video (timelapse and realtime):

As I wrapped up video editing at home, evidence of the strength of the cold advection behind the front was plentiful. At 8:30pm, snow was already being reported in St. Charles county on the west side of the metro area, Kansas City had icy bridges and pings of sleet could be heard on my window. That's only 2 hours after I'd been in a warm-sector thunderstorm with temperatures at 70°F. That's the fastest such transition I've experienced in my chasing career.

Storms were expected to fire along and behind a strong cold front pushing through the Midwest this day, but mostly to the northeast of our area. I went out to shoot a timelapse of the dry frontal passage over the Prairie State power plant (as I'd done with a similar front back in 2012), but the front was moving much faster than I'd expected, and arrived before I could get set up. This sequence from my dsahcams is what I was intending to capture on the better camera, the wind shift arriving at the smokestack's plume:

The northerly winds behind the front were quite potent, kicking up dust from the fields and even breaking some large tree branches.

A couple hours later, some post-frontal asperatus clouds moved overhead at sunset just before some weak convection managed to fire just east of town. Data showed a couple of lightning strikes to our east after darkness fell, but I didn't see them.