EF1 tornado in Caddo Parish, Louisiana

This EF1 tornado with estimated maximum winds near 93 mph touched down just east of the Texas/Louisiana state line in Caddo Parish and generally moved due east along Blanchard Furrh Road. Most of the damage consisted of snapped and uprooted softwood trees and a couple of snapped hardwood trees. A metal truss tower and a pump station were bent in half toward the ground, consistent with EF1 damage. The tower appeared to have been twisted from the north and then bent toward the east. The tornado then lifted just before the intersection of Blanchard Furrh Road and Springwood Lane. The tornado had a width of 114 yards and tracked just less than 4 miles.

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.