Funnel cloud near Melcher Dallas. Photo by Tim Johnson, submitted to the National Weather Service.
A survey team from the National Weather Service is looking over the damage from a tornado that touched down in south-central Iowa last night near Knoxville and Pleasantville.
Meteorologist Donna Dubberke, at the Weather Service office in metro Des Moines, says there were multiple reports of funnel clouds and tornadoes in Marion and Warren counties, but it appears it was a single twister that reached the ground.
“At this point, we think it’s just one,” Dubberke says. “Once we get out, today is a lot about piecing all those puzzle pieces together to see exactly how it developed and from the video and what we’ve seen, it looks like it was one.”
There are dozens of reports of hail during last night’s storm from locations scattered across a wide section of Iowa, damaging the siding and roofs of houses, smashing windows and ruining vehicles.
“Pretty much diagonally, from the southwest corner of the state up to the northeast, there were hail reports,” Dubberke says. “Some of the larger hail reports were up to three inches in diameter which is very large, so baseball-size and larger. The Osceola area had quite a bit, Davenport had some reports of that as well.”
The Quad Cities reported peak wind gusts of 90 miles an hour, straight-line winds which broke off tree limbs and caused power outages. Despite the wreckage, last night’s storms were not as severe as last Friday’s barrage.
“With widespread areas certainly, for the hail and a lot of several rounds of storms,” she says, “so it was longer-lasting in some ways but did not have quite the intensity that the one on Friday had.”
That previous storm spun off at least 16 tornadoes and left 18 Iowa counties declared disaster areas, with at least nine people injured. Dubberke says the storms should be gone for a while now and calmer, springtime weather is ahead.
“The rest of this week and into the weekend, it looks nice, a warming trend,” Dubberke says. “Today, it’ll be the coldest day, then warming a little bit each day, and tomorrow and Friday, we should have some nice sunshine. Next chance of rain is on Sunday and as of right now, it doesn’t look all that impactful.”
Temperatures through the weekend are forecast to warm into the 60s and 70s, with 80s likely next week.