Thunderstorm Safety and Preparedness

Thunderstorm Complex in Kansas Resembled a Tropical Storm on Radar Early Wednesday

Radar animation of a cluster of thunderstorms resembling a tropical storm with an eye-like feature near the border between Kansas and Oklahoma early Wednesday.

At a Glance

A complex of thunderstorms formed a small area of low pressure in Kansas early Wednesday.
It resembled a tropical storm on radar.
The small-scale low-pressure system is called a mesoscale convective vortex.

A complex of thunderstorms in southern Kansas might have looked like a tropical storm on Doppler radar early Wednesday, but it's actually another type of low-pressure system often found in the Plains during summer.

The radar animation above shows the thunderstorms rotating in a counterclockwise fashion near the border between southeast Kansas and northeast Oklahoma just after midnight on Wednesday. It briefly resembled a tropical storm or hurricane when the thunderstorms rotated around an eye-like feature that appeared on radar.

That's not an eye, however, but rather a small-scale area of low pressure generated by a large complex of thunderstorms. It's called a mesoscale-convective vortex, or MCV, and they occasionally form in nighttime thunderstorm complexes that roam through the Plains and Midwest in spring and summer.

There's nothing special about the eye-like feature in this MCV, and it's not comparable to the eye of a tropical storm or hurricane. It just marks the center of the area of low pressure aloft.

A separate MCV appeared on satellite imagery Tuesday afternoon near the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.

(MORE: Why Thunderstorms Complexes Are Dangerous and Important)

MCV's can last for 12 hours or longer after the thunderstorm complex that spawned it dies off, according to the National Severe Storms Lab.

The storms associated with an MCV can sometimes trigger flash flooding or produce damaging wind gusts and isolated tornadoes. The MCV from early Wednesday caused localized flash flooding in southeast Kansas.

An MCV can also help instigate additional thunderstorms later in the day.

Occasionally, these MCVs have pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, helping to initiate sufficiently persistent thunderstorms to form a tropical cyclone.