Close Call: Photos show near tornadic storm

Another busy night at The Huttner Weather Lab tonight.

Now that I have a minute to come up for air, here's a rough timeline of the storm that came within a razor's edge of dropping a tornado in the southwest metro. The visual evidence below combined with radar signatures shows we got very lucky in the southwest metro tonight.

The sky turned green at the Weather Lab tonight. The rain and wind gusted fitfully. It's a sky I've seen before. My first thought? This could go tornadic.

At 7:38 pm I tweeted the radar loop showing the rotating storm as it moved into Eden Prairie. The storm actually passed right over the radar site (black hole) in Chanhassen. That's a disadvantage when it comes to detecting storm rotation. Radar beams shoot out horizontally, not overhead.

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At 7:46 pm the Twin Cities NWS issued a tornado warning for the southwest metro for that storm.

In between live on-air updates on MPR News, I grabbed this image of the wall cloud off MNDOT cams. This is a pretty classic looking wall cloud, often a predecessor to a tornado.

Soon additional impressive images rolled in on twitter from weather watchers showing the classic wall cloud structure.

Back at the Weather Lab, sirens wailed in the distance as the tornado warned storm moved east of my location.

It appears we escaped a tornado touchdown by the narrowest of margins in the southwest metro tonight. All the ingredients were there with this one storm tonight, except the final piece.

Many of us in the southwest metro can count a few weather blessings tonight.