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EF0 tornado in Crawford County, Ohio

Tornado April 1, 2023 · Crawford County, Ohio

EF0
Rating
2.9 mi
Path length
200 yd
Path width
$70K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 200 yards (0.11 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 brief EF0 tornado with estimated peak winds of 85 mph impacted Crawford County. The tornado began five-miles ENE of Sycamore, ended four-miles west of Chatfield, and caused damage along and near the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad. As the tornado moved eastward, the roof of a barn was damaged near County Road 100 and then a large dairy barn was damaged and displaced. Farther east, the tornado ripped a silo's bolts from a concrete pad and the silo was displaced onto railroad tracks, where a westward-moving train collided with the silo. Even farther east, a two-car garage was damaged and several two-by-fours were impaled into the ground and roof of a nearby house.

The wider storm

A surface low moved east-northeastward from southern Lake Michigan to Lake Ontario during the morning through early afternoon of April 1st. Simultaneously, the low's trailing cold front moved from the southwestern Great Lakes and Middle MS Valley toward central NY and the Upper OH Valley. Scattered multicell showers and thunderstorms persisted generally northeastward and eastward ahead of, along, and just behind the surface cold front during the wee hours of the 1st and again during the late morning through early afternoon of the 1st. These showers and storms encountered moderate to strong effective bulk shear, weak DCAPE, and weak MUCAPE that increased somewhat and transitioned from elevated to surface-based by late morning as the boundary layer destabilized via daytime heating. Despite the marginally-favorable thermodynamic environment, showers and storms generated sporadic damaging convective gusts and a tornado during the wee hours of the 1st. Additional straight-line convective wind damage occurred during the late morning through early afternoon of the 1st.

Began near Plankton (40.9597, -83.0709).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1091566. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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