EF2 Tornado — Crawford, Ohio

2024-03-14 · near New Washington, Crawford, Ohio

Event narrative

An EF2 tornado with estimated peak winds of 120 mph impacted Crawford County. This tornado began along Marsh Road, just northeast of New Washington, and tracked east-southeastward. The tornado damaged trees and homes as it moved across Auburn Township and then intensified as it tracked along Kenestrick Road, where multiple residences and outbuildings were damaged. The tornado destroyed a single wide manufactured home and an outbuilding before moving into Richland County.

Wider weather episode

A cold front drifted south-southeastward from near the northern shore of Lake Erie and southern Lower MI to near the southern shore of Lake Erie and far-northwestern OH during the evening of the 14th as a warm and relatively-moist sector preceded the front in northern OH. Multicell and supercell thunderstorms occurred along and ahead of the front, and persisted generally eastward. Severe hail, some large, and isolated straight-line convective wind damage occurred as the storms encountered weak to moderate MUCAPE, relatively-steep midlevel lapse rates near 7C/km, and moderate to strong effective bulk shear. Three separate supercells spawned a tornado amidst favorably-strong, surface-based effective storm relative helicity and favorably-low mixed layer lifting condensation levels less than 1500 meters AGL. The training supercell thunderstorms with heavy rainfall produced isolated flash flooding as well.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (40.9770, -82.8358)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1166697. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.