EFU Tornado — Seneca, Ohio

2024-03-14 · near Alvada, Seneca, Ohio

Event narrative

Based on several social media photos and videos, eyewitness reports, and law enforcement reports, an intermittent tornado of unknown intensity tracked east-southeastward from Hancock County into Seneca County before dissipating just southeast of Township Road 6 and U.S. Route 23. This tornado occurred about two-miles south of Alvada. The maximum width was estimated because no damage path was found.

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 → (41.0276, -83.4205)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1166701. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.