EF0 Tornado — Portage, Ohio

2024-05-11 · near Brimfield Station, Portage, Ohio

Event narrative

A brief EF0 tornado with estimated peak winds of 65 mph impacted the Brimfield area. The tornado began near an industrial building parking lot on Sunnybrook Road, north of Old Forge Road. As the tornado moved generally eastward, it crossed Sunnybrook Road and traversed portions of a golf course, where it damaged several trees and dislodged tiles from a footbridge before dissipating near the bridge.

Wider weather episode

At the surface, an occluded low drifted eastward from Saginaw Bay to southern Lake Huron during the late morning through early evening of the 11th. Simultaneously, the attendant cold front swept eastward across north-central and northeast OH, and overtook the warm front that drifted northeastward across northeast OH and vicinity. During the early afternoon, a brief and weak tornado occurred in Portage County in vicinity of the triple point (i.e. where the expanding occluded front, cold front, warm front intersected). This tornado and its marginal parent supercell occurred amidst moderate effective bulk shear, weak MUCAPE, favorably-low mixed layer lifting condensation levels near 1kft AGL, and surface-based effective storm-relative helicity enhanced by backed surface winds just ahead of the surface warm front.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (41.0929, -81.3726)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1167698. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.