While a significant severe weather outbreak with several strong tornadoes struck parts of northwest Kansas to the west, and south central Nebraska to the north on this Monday afternoon, this-six county area in North Central Kansas almost missed out on severe weather entirely. A major exception was across the far northwest corner of Phillips County. Shortly before 3 PM CDT, an EF1 tornado crossed out of Norton County five miles west of the community of Long Island, and moved northeast. During its short stay in Phillips County, this tornado damaged a few farm buildings before the parent supercell storm went on to spawn another tornado in Harlan County Nebraska. Prior to entering Phillips County, this tornado tracked for several miles in eastern Norton County, striking several farms and completely destroying a residence.
This portion of North Central Kansas was fortunate, largely missing out on severe weather through the entire afternoon and evening, despite several supercells impacting areas just to the west, north and east. This was largely due to the fact that these six counties remained anchored almost directly underneath the mid-level dry intrusion, with the parent mid-level low pressure system centered just to the west. As a result, tornadic thunderstorms focused to the north in Nebraska near a lifting warm front, while non-tornadic severe storms developed just east of the area near the Highway 81 corridor along a surging dryline.
This regional severe weather outbreak was driven by a powerful mid-level low pressure system lifted into western Kansas and Nebraska out of Colorado, deepening and closing off as it did so. Strong wind fields aloft were in place at all levels, with a 50-70 knot jet streak nosing into the region between the 500 and 300 millibar level, and an 850-millibar low-level jet accelerating to between 30 and 40 knots. At the surface, a well-defined 992-millibar low pressure center migrated from near Rooks County around the noon hour, to near Hastings, Nebraska, by early evening. A synoptically classic array of surface boundaries evolved around this low pressure center. Around the time of the Phillips County tornado, favorable mesoscale parameters of shear and instability included approximately 50 knots of deep-layer vertical wind shear, 20 knots of 0-1 kilometer low-level vertical wind shear, 200 m2/s2 of surface-to-1 kilometer storm-relative helicity and 3000 J/kg mixed-layer CAPE.