This storm then dropped another, albeit brief, tornado as it crossed into Falls County near the town of Bruceville-Eddy. The first significant tornado of the day occurred in extreme southwestern McLennan County on the south side of FM 107, 1.6 miles east-southeast of Moody. This F3 tornado tossed a car and pickup truck several hundred feet and destroyed a residence and farm building during its 20 minute life cycle. This sudden westward jog (from Bruceville-Eddy) was a sign that propagation effects were beginning to more strongly dictate the storm’s motion, and new updrafts would sequentially re-develop, paralleling I-35 over the hours to come.
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Radar loop from Austin/San Antonio’s WSR-88D (KEWX) from 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM. Base Reflectivity on the left, and Storm-Relative Velocity on the right.
The next tornado was another brief one, and actually formed ahead of the parent supercell just northwest of Belton in northern Bell County. Towards the end of the animated loop, you’ll notice a small blob of higher (yellow and red) reflectivities “pop up” west of Temple. This is a brand new updraft developing along the main supercell’s “flanking line”, and as vorticity near the cold front was stretched in the updraft, a brief tornado developed around 2:15 PM, as reported by Lon Curtis, who was following the storm with one of the forecasters from the Fort Worth office, Al Moller. The next, substantial tornado of the day, was only minutes away from developing.
