Tornado kills two in Missouri; more tornadoes on tap for today

The tropical Atlantic is quiet today, and none of the reliable models are predicting tropical cyclone formation over the next five days.

At approximately 12:15 am CDT this morning, a tornado near Paris, Missouri, killed two people when it ripped apart their mobile home and tossed them 400 feet away. At least four other tornadoes hit Missouri yesterday, and two tornadoes touched down in Texas, and one each in Louisiana and Mississippi. The driver of a Petal Water & Sewer service truck was hospitalized in Mississippi after strong winds picked up his truck and tossed it across I-59.

Another severe weather outbreak is expected today in the U.S., from the Mississippi Valley northward through the Tennessee Valley and the Great Lakes. Tornado Watches have already been posted, and today's severe weather has the potential to generate a few strong, long-track tornadoes. You can follow the outbreak today on our new interactive tornado map, which will post the tornado damage reports as they are received. The new feature also allows one to plot all the historical tornado activity back to 1950 for any region in the U.S. If you take a wunderphoto of a tornadic storm or tornado damage, and click on the "tornado" type of image flag when uploading it, our software will attempt to match your photo to the storm report for that tornado. These photos will then be available when you click on a storm report on the interactive tornado page. One of the storm reports for Missouri yesterday has several wunderphotos of the thunderstorm that spawned the tornado available, thanks to wunderphotographer Paleohebrew.

Jeff Masters