00:00Here's some footage of tornado damage video from Downey, Iowa.
00:05Downey in far eastern Iowa.
00:07This has been an area where there has been, again, some debris.
00:12Now, it doesn't look like high-end damage, which is good news,
00:15but it looks like some perhaps structural outbuildings, signs, sheet metal, and so forth,
00:22kind of destroyed there.
00:23But thankfully, the larger structures do appear to be still upright,
00:27solar panels in place, and so forth.
00:29So we're going to learn more about this.
00:30That's a problem there, though.
00:31You can see the roof off of that barn due to a likely tornado.
00:37And we can just call it a tornado.
00:38I mean, there's the footage to the left.
00:39You can see the tornado that produced this under the base of that swirling cloud.
00:44So, again, thanks for watching here on the AccuWeather Network
00:47as we continue with our live storm coverage.
00:50We're tracking some nasty thunderstorms through parts of Michigan now,
00:54eastern Iowa, and Illinois, those three states facing the worst of this at the moment.
00:58As we take a look at radar and satellite, there's also a snowy side to this,
01:02and Anna's been talking about that quite a bit.
01:04We're going to be checking in on some storms that are still rolling east through parts of Iowa,
01:08Illinois, southern Michigan.
01:09Indiana's going to be also on the list of concern tonight,
01:13and some of these storms have been nasty in Iowa.
01:16So we want to check out what's going on here with these storms
01:18and also with others that are yet to come tomorrow coming out of a western storm system
01:23rolling through the Rockies into the plains, more storms into the plains tomorrow.
01:27But for the short term, AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach is on the move.
01:33And, Tony, have you crossed the river?
01:35It looks like he is now into Illinois real estate making good time on Interstate 80.
01:39So, Tony, what are you experiencing?
01:43Well, Jeff, oddly enough, we're kind of splitting the difference between severe storms to the north
01:48and the tornadic storm that just came out of Galesburg to the south.
01:51We are about 20 miles as the crow flies due north of where that kind of radar-indicated circulation
01:58seems to be as it's approaching the town of Toulon, Illinois.
02:02We're going to get a little bit further east here as we head toward the town of Princeton.
02:07Right about there is kind of where the Illinois River comes down,
02:10so we have to be a little more picky about where we go
02:13just because we'll have more limited crossings to stick with that.
02:16But that storm is approaching I-80 kind of in an east-northeast fashion,
02:21so by the time we get to Princeton, we should be able to drop south on it
02:25and get a view back into that thing if that remains tornadic
02:28as it continues to work its way to the east.
02:30Obviously, the storm we left in Illinois obviously produced the tornado there near Downing,
02:37so that continued to be tornadic, so multiple tornadoes that storm produced.
02:41We saw the first two that came down.
02:43Fortunately, they looked brief and relatively weak, as Jeff mentioned there,
02:47with some of the damage.
02:49That tornado likely also probably the same equivalent of the tornadoes we saw,
02:53just unfortunately came down in an area with a few more structures to hit.
02:56So hopefully that is minor and that stays that way.
03:00But again, currently right now we are eastbound on I-80.
03:03We are just now hitting the Anawan exit here, so this will be exit 33.
03:08So we are going to continue east, probably another 10 or 15 miles or so,
03:12and then we'll start to look to drop south to get in front of that tornadic storm.
03:17Again, that thing has been tornadic for quite a while since it went through the Galesburg area.
03:21I do know that it had a funnel cloud at some point reported,
03:24but most of the time this has remained a radar-indicated tornado threat.
03:29So we'll get some eyes on it here before, hopefully within the next 30 minutes or so,
03:34and we'll be able to kind of get a better idea what that storm looks like.
03:37As now Illinois is starting to get in on the action of what has been a very active day here
03:41in the Midwest, Jeff.
03:43I'm seeing about 69 to 70 mph gate-to-gate shear with this storm
03:47as it moves through the area near Toulon and approaching Elmira, Illinois, Modena, Illinois.
03:52This is in Stark County of Illinois.
03:54The tornado warning is still officially in effect for parts of eastern Knox,
03:57but it's mainly Stark County where that risk is.
04:00And again, I was kind of showing you the plan that Tony has as he is very close to Anawan.
04:06As I zoom in, he's going to travel a little farther east.
04:09I'm going to zoom in once more along Interstate 80.
04:12I saw the label there in Anawan.
04:14So Tony's eastbound on I-80.
04:16He's going to hook it south and put himself in position ahead of this storm.
04:21And his goal is going to be to stay on the south side of it, so kind of wrap down
04:24into the south.
04:25But he was mentioning some of the navigation issues here as we have the Illinois River
04:29that wraps down an area here from Peru to Henry.
04:32And that really interrupts the road grid, so you've got to be selective sometimes.
04:36Only so many access points to cross.
04:39So this is some of the decisions that storm chasers like Tony make
04:41when they see a feature like that on the geographical map.
Comments