EF2 Tornado — Union, Iowa

2024-04-26 · near Afton, Union, Iowa

Event narrative

This tornado formed between the BNSF railroad and Highway 34 west of Afton and took a track very similar to a tornado which occurred earlier in the hour. It produced EF2 damage to several house on either side of Highway 34 as it travelled to the northeast. The tornado crossed Three Mile Lake just upstream of the dam and impacted a structure in the Wildlife Management Building area just a few hundred yards from the one impacted in the earlier tornado. This tornado then moved northeast through rural Union County impacting another farmstead producing EF2 damage. The tornado dissipated in the north central portion of Union County near the intersection of Pheasant Avenue and 130th Street.

Wider weather episode

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.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (41.0399, -94.2517)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1170068. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.