Late Friday night, into early Saturday morning, a large complex of severe thunderstorms swept across portions of Southeastern Minnesota and Northern Iowa. For many, this system brought several inches of rain in a very short time period! It also brought power outages to some communities across Northern Iowa.
The system that impacted the viewing area last night is known to meteorologists as a Mesoscale Convective System (MCS). A MCS is a large complex of well organized thunderstorms that often assumes a bow-like appearance, and advances very quickly downstream. These systems are often responsible for copious amounts of rainfall in a very short period of time, and last night was no exception!
This MCS can be tracked to Eastern South Dakota, where thunderstorms began developing ahead of a cold front around 5:00PM or so. Through the evening, these storms continued to develop and merge across Western and Southwestern Minnesota while gradually advancing eastward…