EF1 Tornado — Portage, Ohio

2024-04-17 · near Windham, Portage, Ohio

Event narrative

An EF1 tornado with estimated peak winds of 110 mph occurred in Windham. The tornado began near the intersection of OH Route 303 and Stanley Road. The tornado

produced wind damage of EF0 to low end EF1 intensity as it downed trees and damaged roofs of several buildings. The tornado continued northeastward toward Bryant Road, where the tornado caused significant damage to a large garage and moved a shed several yards, in addition to downing several trees. The tornado crossed

the Ohio Turnpike, impacted three tractor trailers, and closed the highway for some time. North of the Ohio Turnpike and off Bryant Road, the tornado heavily damaged a mobile home, flipped over a car and boat, and caused other minor structural damage,

indicative of EF1 damage. The tornado continued northeast toward Parkman Road, Crestview Drive, Wisteria Street, and Geneva Drive. This area experienced the greatest damage from the tornado, indicative of the 110 mph rating. Several homes were heavily damaged with loss of roofing material, siding, and blown out windows. Two homes were shifted off their foundations. Numerous large trees were downed onto some homes. The tornado continued northeastward and crossed OH Route 82, west of Horn Road, where several trees were snapped. The tornado continued producing tree

damage to Frazier Road before dissipating prior to reaching Silica Sand Road.

Wider weather episode

At the surface, an occluded low drifted from northeastern WI to the central Upper Peninsula of MI during the early afternoon through early evening of the 17th. Simultaneously, the low's attendant warm front drifted eastward across central Lake Erie and far-western PA, and the low's attendant cold front swept eastward from near the northwest OH/northeast IN border and central IN to near the OH/PA border, which caused the warm sector to shrink with time. Scattered multicell thunderstorms and a few supercell thunderstorms developed along and ahead of the cold front, and persisted generally eastward across northern OH as the storms encountered weak to moderate MUCAPE and DCAPE, respectively, and moderate to strong effective bulk shear. This environment allowed storms to produce damaging hail and straight-line convective wind gusts, respectively. Three tornadoes also occurred amidst favorably-low mixed layer lifting condensation levels less than 1500 meters AGL and favorably-strong, surface-based effective storm-relative helicity.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (41.2323, -81.0813)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1166893. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.