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EF0 tornado in Crawford County, Indiana

Tornado May 7, 2024 · Crawford County, Indiana

EF0
Rating
0.2 mi
Path length
80 yd
Path width
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 80 yards (0.05 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

The National Weather Service in Louisville, in coordination with Crawford County Indiana Emergency Management, concluded that a brief EF0 tornado touched down a tenth of a mile southwest of Sulphur Springs on the evening of May 7, 2024. The tornado touched down near the Stinking Fork just south of Sulphur Springs where it uprooted some hardwoods and scattered them in differing directions. The tornado then traveled east northeast where it destroyed the lean-to of a small barn, scattering debris

downwind. The tornado then widened to approximately 80 yards where it threw a carport about 75 yards to the northeast onto South Old Union Church Road. From here, the tornado maintained intensity with estimated 75 to 80 mph winds where a few trees were uprooted and downed in differing directions, mostly to the north of the

easterly storm motion. One healthy hardwood was even downed back

to a northwest direction, providing strong evidence of the cyclonic rotation. The tornado ended after it downed one more hardwood about 0.2 miles east southeast of Sulphur Springs just before South Old Union Church Road.

The wider storm

During the evening and early overnight hours on May 7th and 8th, a cold front moved eastward from the mid Mississippi Valley into the Ohio Valley. Ample instability was present in the warm sector ahead of the front, though poor mid-level lapse rates initially hindered storm development across the region. Just before sunset, a few discrete cells began to develop along the Ohio River in southern Indiana, quickly gaining supercell characteristics in the presence of strong deep-layer shear. While weak mid-level lapse rates prevented explosive growth of these cells, they were strong enough to produce two weak tornadoes in southern Indiana. The tornadic cells also produced minor straight-line wind damage after the tornado lifted. Sporadic straight-line wind damage was also observed with another wave of storms later during the early morning hours of May 8th.

Began near Sulphur Spgs (38.2090, -86.4863).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

1 more tornado the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 1187013. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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