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EF0 tornado in Boone County, Indiana

Tornado March 31, 2023 · Boone County, Indiana

EF0
Rating
12.3 mi
Whole path
50 yd
Path width
$1.0M
Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Montgomery County → Montgomery County → Boone County → Boone County → Clinton County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 50 yards (0.03 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

Continuation from Montgomery County of the secondary, EF0 tornado (that tracked just southeast of the nearby, multi-county EF2 tornado). A barn just west of the Montgomery-Boone county line was partially destroyed by 85 mph winds, with debris blown into Boone County and one-quarter mile to the northeast. The tornado also downed utility poles along the county line road before causing tree damage and shifting an older barn from its foundation.

The wider storm

A strong, occluding storm system over the Upper Midwest produced a deep column of strong southwesterly winds over the Midwest on the afternoon and evening of the 31st.

This pattern generated an inordinate amount of vertical wind shear. The overall southwesterly flow also brought rather mild and somewhat humid air into the region, which was adequately unstable given noticeably colder air aloft, especially over the southwestern quadrant of Indiana.

Resulting thunderstorms were able to mix down the stronger winds to the surface as damaging straight line gusts, while a rather low freezing level promoted isolated large hail. Ten tornadoes occurred across the region: 5 from a rotating supercell thunderstorm that tracked roughly parallel to and about 20 miles south of Interstate 70, and 5 others spawned from a squall line's northern book-end vortex that impacted north-central central Indiana. The supercell's first two tornadoes (both EF3) caused a combined 5 fatalities...before the supercell spawned two more strong tornadoes (EF2/EF3), with the cell's final EF3 inflicting major damage on a warehouse in Whiteland (Johnson Co.). The (northern) squall line's first tornado was an EF2 that impacted mostly rural areas...while the squall line's four following tornadoes were all weak (EF0/EF1), with the final three spawned over Howard County, concluding with a longer tracking EF1 that injured one person.

Began near Thorntown (40.1383, -86.6957).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

8 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1089766. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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