EF1 Tornado — Claiborne, Louisiana

2025-03-04 · near Darley, Claiborne, Louisiana

Event narrative

This brief EF-1 tornado with estimated maximum winds near 110 mph touched down just to the west of Harris Road in southwestern Claiborne Parish. On the other side of the street, several structures had damage, with two of them being damaged from fallen trees. Surrounding snapped power poles and trees fallen on top of each other gave the survey team confidence that the damage was tornadic. The prevalence of damage in the area allowed the maximum track width of 300 yards to be calculated. The tornado continued east and caused more tree damage. After crossing Old Arcadia Road, the tornado shifted to a more northeastern track before going into an area of cut-down trees. The lack of damage indicators and accessible roads prevented any tornado path from being followed. The path was picked up again just to the southeast of Kemp Road where there was an area of softwood and hardwood trees snapped and uprooted. The convergence of these fallen trees led the team to believe this was the continued tornado track rather than a separate area of straight line wind damage. The on-ground track decreased quickly after this area of trees, which was consistent with the weakening of the tornadic radar signature. There was more tree damage outside of the tornado track, which was likely due to straight-line damaging winds on the southern edge of the tornadic circulation.

Wider weather episode

A very mature squall line developed along and ahead of an advancing cold front across the Ark-La-Tex region during the late morning through the afternoon hours on March 4th. Damaging wind gusts were the primary threat with this squall line, but numerous strong mesovorticies became embedded within this quasi-linear convective system (QLCS). Dew points were in the mid to upper 60s with over 500 J/kg of MLCAPE and 450 m2/s2 of 0-1 km storm relative helicity (SRH). As temperatures continued to warm into the lower 70s with MLCAPE increasing to around 1000 J/kg MLCAPE, the increasing threat of supercell thunderstorm development only heightened the tornado threat into the afternoon. As a result, numerous reports of damaging straight-line wind gusts and several tornadoes were documented across North Louisiana along with isolated flash flooding.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (32.6138, -93.1630)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1249731. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.