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EF0 tornado in Madison County, Iowa

Tornado April 26, 2024 · Madison County, Iowa

EF0
Rating
13.9 mi
Whole path
100 yd
Path width
$110K
Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Union County → Madison County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 100 yards (0.06 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

This tornado moved into Madison County from Union County. Upon entering the county, the path of the tornado took a left turn moving nearly due north along Heritage Avenue. It impacted a couple of homesteads along this road producing mainly tree damage before lifting north of 330th Street.

The wider storm

Multiple rounds of storms moved across the area on April 26th. The first round was fueled by broad thermal lift and passed across Iowa through the morning with a few of these storms producing small hail but all remained sub severe. The area dried out and cleared out behind this round, allowing for a few hours of destabilization. By afternoon the warm sector was sufficiently unstable between the warm front and a dryline. Robust convection developed along that dryline in the afternoon in western Nebraska, moving into Iowa in the early evening. With sufficient instability, the increasing low level jet, and SRH exceeding 300 m2/s2, large hail and tornadoes occurred with storms across western to central Iowa. In all, 28 tornadoes occurred in Iowa with 18 within the NWS Des Moines area.

Began near Barney (41.1568, -94.1137).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

17 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1170053. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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