EF0 tornado in Appling County, Georgia

Tornado December 30, 2021 · Appling County, Georgia

EF0

Rating

11.7 mi

Whole path

300 yd

Path width

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Jeff Davis County → Appling County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 300 yards (0.17 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF0 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF0 is light damage: shingles and siding peeled, gutters torn, branches broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 65–85 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

A tornado began to decrease down to an EF0 as it tracked over the Jeff Davis and Appling county border. The last tornado damage found was along Alma Highway where a couple of softwood trees were snapped and branches broken ranging from 1 to 3 inches in diameter. This is the end of the tornado track.

The wider storm

A broken prefrontal squall line shifted southward into the Ocmulgee and Altamaha River basins during the afternoon and early evening hours. Warm, moist southwesterly flow ahead of the line increased low-level moisture and destabilized the area with afternoon surface-based CAPE around 1000 J/kg and dew points near 70 degrees. The cold front and upper trough approached from the northwest increasing 0-6 km shear to around 40-50 knots with an area of 0-3 km SRH near 200 m2/s2 west-northwest of Waycross, GA. These convective ingredients allowed for a few strong to severe thunderstorms to develop and produce damaging winds and a brief tornado. A severe thunderstorm moving through southern Jeff Davis county produced an EF1 intensity tornado that formed south of Denton, GA. The tornado tracked east-northeastward around 25 mph through Jeff Davis county before dissipating as soon as the severe thunderstorm moved into Appling county.

Began near Graham (31.7410, -82.5510).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1003840. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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