Day 4 of our chase trip was simply amazing.

We spend the third day, on Tuesday, touring the April 2 tornado path scenes in Caruthersville, Mo., and Marmaduke, Ark., a sobering reminder to all of us of what heartache tornadoes can cause. We also caught some nice pulse storms with shelf clouds and cumulonimbus clouds scraping the open skies of the Missouri Bootheel. A nice day that ended with catfish in my hometown of Jonesboro, Ark.

On the fourth day, we eyed a slight risk zone of severe weather in Illinois hoping to find one supercell on the western fringe that would have the right wind shear to rotate, becoming a supercell. The photos, by Pulaski High School senior Stephanie Taylor, speak for themselves. We witnessed multiple rotating wall cloud structures over the open fields on central Illinois, being careful to position ourselves where we could dodge the large hail associated with the storm.

From a weather pattern that has been meager for severe weather, our jaws dropped at the beauty of the spectacle that unfolded. We don't know if a tornado actually touched the ground, and will review our video carefully, but several low rotating masses descended from the layered wall clouds we watched.

UPDATE: Watch a video clip of the storm

UPDATE 5/20: I added one more nice photo from our Wednesday chase, as the low hanging wall cloud drops toward the Illinois farmland.

Pictured in the photo are Stephanie Taylor, the Pulaski County High School senior who shot the other two pictures I used, and Lorenza Cooper, a rising senior at Virginia Tech.

We're in Joplin, Mo., now, after a busted chase day in southeast Missouri, and slim prospects for thunderstorms the next couple of days.

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• Posted by Kevin Myatt in Storms
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