Update 5/9 1:50 p.m.:
A National Weather Service survey team has confirmed that an EF-1 tornado touched down southeast of Monett in northern Barry County Wednesday afternoon and tracked northeast into Lawrence County before lifting southeast of Aurora. Several trees were uprooted or snapped, according to the weather service, and there was damage to several outbuildings. A mobile home was flipped over, and there was damage to roofs. The 150-foot-wide tornado was on the ground for approximately 10 1/2 miles.
Original story:
Residents in Lawrence County are beginning to clean up from severe storms, including a tornado, that moved through Wednesday afternoon.
According to reports submitted to the National Weather Service, homes and buildings southwest of Verona and in Aurora were damaged or destroyed. Multiple trees are also down in that area. There was also damage reported in Monett. Some parts of the Ozarks saw large hail. There are no reports of injuries.
Mark Burchfield, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield said teams from his office are in the area doing surveys.
Those, he said, can be time consuming, but are very important.
"We want to go to the site to see what type of damage is there," he said. "We want to see which way things are falling, the direction of trees that were fallen or even structures that were damaged. We want to know what type of structure it is and how was the building built? You know, how is the type of construction that they used. That all helps us...try to understand how fast that wind was going and so that we can kind of make a determination of what really happened there."
He said the surveys help them learn from each storm that moves through, and that better informs their work in the future.
"Especially going forward in time, we want to know what that storm did so that in the future we can know what happened in the past, for additional storms later on we can figure out the type of environment it takes for those and the radar signatures and how everything matches, so it's a critical component to storm surveys and why they're important."
Some surveys can take days because meteorologists are trying to piece everything together. He said teams will also continue looking at damage Thursday from storms that occurred several days ago.