EF0 tornado in Logan County, Kentucky

The National Weather Service conducted a storm survey on Tuesday, March 17th for the storms that occurred on Sunday night, March 15th. A tornado was determined to have occurred in Logan County with max winds of 85 MPH (EF0).

Damage was first observed along Forgy Road where some large softwood trees were either uprooted or snapped. Due to the isolated nature of the damage, a lower bound was used at 80 mph as the max wind speed at this location. The tornado continued to the northeast along Duncan Ridge Road where more trees were uprooted. Moving east along Duncan Ridge Road, more trees were uprooted and a residence had shingle damage. Near Deer Lick Road (to the west of Lewisburg), there was a roof lofted off a storage outbuilding at a residence where wood planks were impaled in a couple of

directions, one of which was in the opposite direction of the storm motion due to the tornado rotation. The max wind of 85 mph occurred at this residence. Additional tree damage was observed across Deer Lick Road.

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.