EF1 Tornado — Shelby, Texas

2025-03-28 · near Hurstown, Shelby, Texas

Event narrative

An EF1 tornado with estimated maximum winds near 95 mph developed during the early afternoon on March 28th, 2025, associated with a mini-supercell and initially began southwest of Shelbyville near the Hurstown community at the intersection of Highway 87 and County Road 2130. At this location, the tornado removed a few metal roof panels from some chicken houses and snapped and uprooted a few trees. The tornado then moved northward snapping and uprooting more trees along County Road 2130. More snapped hardwood and softwood trees were noted as the tornado crossed County Road 2625, County Road 2635, and Farm-to-Market Road 2694. The tornado finally lifted along Forest Service Road 143 just south of Farm-to-Market Road 417. Despite a relatively weak velocity couplet on the KSHV WSR-88D radar, the damage path was well observed in the vicinity of a TDS in the correlation coefficient data.

Wider weather episode

Numerous showers and thunderstorms developed across the Four State Region on March 28th in response to an upper-level disturbance moving across the Red River Valley of North Texas and Southern Oklahoma. As the afternoon hours progressed, strong southerly flow allowed for temperatures and dew points to rise, creating a more unstable atmosphere with MLCAPE values approaching 1000 J/kg. Thunderstorms started to strengthen in intensity during this period, with modest shear profiles across East Texas, Western Louisiana and adjacent Southwest Arkansas. Rotational signatures were detected in several of the stronger storms through the evening hours. This required the issuance of several tornado warnings across the aforementioned areas. As a result, an EF1 tornado was reported in Shelby County Texas.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (31.7024, -94.0339)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1249629. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.