Storm chaser Aaron Jayjack reported live from St. Louis on the evening of March 14 as the threat for tornadoes and severe storms ramped up across the region.
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00:00Aaron, this is going to be one of the areas that we're primarily watching up
00:03potential of severe weather, so give us an update.
00:09Yeah, I'm here in the outskirts of St. Louis right along I-55 and actually if you look over
00:14my shoulder you can see those storms that y'all were talking about that are a little bit further
00:17to the west. They're going through Columbia or just gone through Columbia, Missouri. I've gone
00:22through Springfield, Missouri. There was one that was tornado warned, but that whole line right now
00:26is severe warned. One of the limiting factors, I originally was in Columbia and I decided to move a
00:31little bit further to the east and down to the south, actually I'm going to work my way south
00:34into the southern part of Missouri, is meager dew points here. We've got some mixing out,
00:40not a lot of dew point moisture for these storms to work with, so that has throttled that tornado
00:45threat some, but my eye is on the higher dew points, seeing 54 dew points down in the boot
00:50heel of Missouri and vecting their way up to the north here to the St. Louis area. So as these
00:54storms come through, that moisture should rise and that tornado threat should amplify here later
00:59this evening into the overnight hours as well. Further to the south, as I mentioned, I'm heading
01:04down to that boot heel area. All along the Mississippi River down into northern Mississippi
01:08could see a threat into the late hours tonight towards midnight, so we'll be tracking these
01:12storms late here tonight and then another threat tomorrow down in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.
01:18High risk for severe storms down there, tornadoes potential down there as well, but
01:23not to get too far ahead, we've got storms to deal with right here tonight here in Missouri,
01:27western Illinois, across the Midwest. Dangerous night unfolding here tonight, so if you do go
01:32to bed tonight and storms haven't made it your way yet, you want to make sure you keep those phones
01:36on, weather radios on, get those alerts, pay attention to the AccuWeather network because
01:40this is the worst case situation when you get those tornadoes, those supercells at night in
01:44the nighttime hours, especially in overnight hours. Back to you guys. All right, very well said there
01:49Aaron. Awareness is something that is a big problem here. When people are not aware of what's
01:55going on, they don't take action and awareness drops off to near zero when you go to sleep. That's
02:00right and as we head into this evening, Aaron was talking about the dew points, which that's a
02:03measure of moisture in the atmosphere and generally speaking, tornadoes really like to have dew points
02:09in the 60s to really get going. If you get in the 70s, that's like super octane fuel, but he was
02:14talking about dew points being in the 50s, so that's still, that's I would say a bare minimum
02:19here to get storms going, so we're going to continue to watch that here as we head into tonight.