Thunderstorm Wind in Sevier County, Arkansas

An NWS survey team confirmed that a microburst produced a narrow swath of wind damage in the town of Gillham just south of the Kansas City Southern Railway to just east of Highway 71. The damage consisted almost entirely of uprooted hardwood and softwood trees, although a few softwood trees were also snapped. The damage was particularly concentrated just north of and down a hill from Gillham Baptist Church. The damage pattern was almost entirely unidirectional, pointing to the northeast, and even diverged slightly in a couple of places, which strongly indicated straight-line wind damage with estimated winds near 90 mph.

Southwest flow aloft developed ahead of a longwave upper trough that entered portions of the Southern Plains and Ozarks region. This resulted in an increase in elevated moisture from the eastern Pacific, specifically from Hurricane Lorena, even as a weak cool front drifted southeast into portions of North Texas, Southeast Oklahoma, and Western Arkansas late in the day on September 5th. Ample Gulf moisture was present ahead of the front, with compressional warming contributing to strong instability as large scale forcing increased with the approaching front. As a result, scattered strong to severe thunderstorms developed over portions of extreme Northeast Texas, Southeast Oklahoma, and Southwest Arkansas during the late evening into the early morning hours of the 5th-6th. These storms produced damaging winds which downed multiple trees across portions of Southwest Arkansas.