Thunderstorm Wind in Hardin County, Kentucky

A swath of damage began just as a tornado along the long-storm track was occluding. It ended close to and east of the area where a different tornado spun up, thus initially appearing from the ground survey team to be a continuous swath of damage.

The first indication of damage was a tree down near Constantine Rd east of Horn Cemetery Rd. The damage path widened near where Constantine Road intersects with Slaughter Rd, where an open air canopy was damaged. Several barns were damaged or destroyed just southwest of Hardinsburg Rd. Additional damage occurred northeast

of that road, along Vertrees Church Ln. No other downstream damage was noted as a tornado path dominated the damage just north and west of this area.

Radar data from the KLVX 88D as well as the TSDF TDWR indicated peak estimated velocities between 80 and 100 kts at around 1000 feet AGL in this region confirming the higher wind gusts that were able to mix down to the surface here and cause the observed damage.

During the late evening and overnight hours March 15th into March 16th, a strong upper level trough and associated cold front moved across the Ohio Valley. Ahead of the cold front, temperatures were in the 70s with dew point temperatures in the upper 50s and low 60s. This corridor of modest low-level destabilization contained between 250 and 500 J/kg of MLCAPE which was oriented immediately ahead of the surface front and the main line of showers and thunderstorms. With a corridor of 80 knot mid-level winds approaching from the west, effective bulk shear was between 40 and 50 knots for this event, creating a typical high-shear, low-CAPE setup for central Kentucky and southern Indiana. While the primary forcing mechanism was lifting along the cold front, resulting in a quasi-linear convective system, some scattered cells developed ahead of the main line of storms across western Kentucky. These storms had transient supercellular characteristics, and would go on to produce a swath of stronger winds and a few embedded tornadoes across Butler, Grayson, Breckinridge, Hardin, and Meade County. Elsewhere across Kentucky, scattered wind damage was produced by the main line of storms, with more favorably oriented segments of the line producing additional weak spin-up tornadoes. As the line of storms pushed east toward the I-75 corridor early in the morning on March 16th, there was a general weakening trend as MLCAPE values dropped to only around 100 J/kg across the Bluegrass. However, the portion of the line across southern Kentucky had access to slightly greater instability, resulting in additional instances of wind damage and a spin-up tornado in Clinton County. The line of storms eventually pushed into eastern Kentucky by around 3 AM on March 16th, with much cooler air rushing into the region behind the cold front.