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EF0 tornado in Erie County, Pennsylvania

Tornado August 12, 2023 · Erie County, Pennsylvania

EF0
Rating
0.5 mi
Path length
20 yd
Path width
$5K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 20 yards (0.01 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 70 mph moved generally southeastward on the southeastern outskirts of Union City. The tornado began just northeast of the intersection of O'Neil Road and Concord Road, and ended before reaching Concord Road. The tornado damaged several trees. One of these trees was downed onto a home, which caused minor structural damage.

The wider storm

An occluded surface low meandered near the eastern shore of Lake Superior during the late morning through early evening of the 12th. Simultaneously, the trailing cold front swept southeastward from southeastern Lower MI and northern IN to central Lake Erie and north-central/west-central portions of OH. Multiple multicell thunderstorms and a supercell thunderstorm occurred ahead of the cold front in northwest PA. These storms produced small hail, damaging convective gusts, and a tornado in a warm sector comprised of moderate to strong MUCAPE and effective bulk shear, respectively, mixed-layer lifting condensation levels near 750 to 1500 meters AGL, and strong surface-based effective storm-relative helicity near 150 meters squared per second squared.

Began near Elgin (41.8790, -79.7884).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

1 more tornado the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1152456. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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