Tornadoes that struck the Kansas City area early Friday didn't show up on National Weather Service radar, so forecasters didn't issue tornado alerts. As a result, residents were surprised by the frocity of the storms.

Weather experts weren't sure what had hit the area until they inspected the damage in daylight. “Sometimes tornadoes are so brief they can spin up and dissipate in a minute or so,” said Suzanne Fortin of the National Weather Service.

The agency’s meteorologists inspected damage Friday and determined that a tornado left a mile-and-a-half damage track in the Kansas City suburb of Gladstone and that a second tornado had struck in the northern part of Kansas City. The cause of wind damage in Independence is still being assessed.

The National Weather Service had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for a massive storm system in a bowed line, called a bow echo system. Bow echo systems produce powerful straight-line winds. But tornadoes apparently formed quickly on the bow echo front.

Read the full story at KansasCity.com.