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EF0 tornado in Marshall County, Kentucky

Tornado July 1, 2023 · Marshall County, Kentucky

EF0

Rating

27.4 mi

Whole path

100 yd

Path width

$245K

Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Graves County → Marshall County → Lyon County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 100 yards (0.06 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

The weak tornado crossed into Marshall County from Graves County near the small community of Oak Level. There were numerous trees and power lines down east of Highway 641 to the Kentucky Lake shore. Damage in western Marshall County consisted of spotty broken tree branches and a few downed trees. Peak winds were estimated near 80 mph in Marshall County. The tornado exited into Lyon County after it moved over Kentucky Lake east of the Moors Camp area.

The wider storm

A couple of lines of thunderstorms moved northeast across far western Kentucky during the late afternoon and evening hours. The first line consisted of semi-discrete cells, one of which was associated with a weak tornado that tracked across the Kentucky Lake area. The second line was associated with a few isolated marginally severe wind gusts to 60 mph. The storms developed in response to a rather amplified 500 mb shortwave trough that progressed east into Iowa and Missouri by nightfall. With daytime heating, the atmosphere became very unstable in the afternoon. Mixed-layer capes were around 3000 j/kg late in the day. A belt of 35 to 45 knot mid-level west-southwesterly winds resulted in sufficient deep-layer wind shear for organized storm structures. An embedded tornado occurred in the vicinity of a residual outflow boundary arcing west from storms over central Kentucky.

Began near Oak Level (36.8730, -88.4840).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1100229. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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