EF1 tornado in Geauga County, Ohio

An EF1 tornado with estimated peak winds of 100-mph impacted the Chesterland area. Radar data indicate this was a rare anticyclonic tornado. The tornado began just northeast of the intersection of Watt Road and Fairmount Road, where a large barn had its roof collapse. As the tornado moved generally eastward, it downed several large pine trees onto a house along Fairmount Road, about halfway between Watt and Sperry Roads, but there was no obvious damage to the home. A power pole was snapped in half at this same location. Farther east along Fairmount Road, the tornado downed additional large pine trees. One of the trees fell onto a home and caused some roof and gutter damage. The tornado ended soon thereafter, just west-northwest of the intersection of Fairmount and Rockhaven Roads.

At the surface, a cold front drifted southeastward across Lake Ontario, southern ON, and southern Lower MI toward Lake Erie during the early afternoon through late evening of the 31st. Ahead of the front, several lines of multicell thunderstorms and a discrete supercell persisted generally eastward across northern OH during the late afternoon through the late evening of the 31st. Some of these storms produced sporadic straight-line convective wind damage, two mesovortex-related tornadoes, and small hail. The ambient environment of these storms included weak to moderate MUCAPE and moderate to strong effective bulk shear. It appears the development of a southwesterly to west-southwesterly low-level jet and resulting enhanced surface-based ESRH coinciding with favorably-low mixed layer LCL's contributed to the development of the two tornadoes.