EF0 tornado in Butler 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 Butler County with max winds of 80 MPH (EF0).

Damage was first observed along Flat Rock Road south of Dimple where a roof was lifted off a storage outbuilding and lofted into nearby trees. Some tree damage was also observed at this location with some evidence of being broken and twisted in different

directions due to the tornado. The tornado continued to the northeast across highway 79 where tree damage was twisted backward in the opposite direction of the storm motion to the southwest.

The tornado continued across Dimple Road and damaged mobile homes along the road. One home had a shed that was destroyed and lofted above the homes and placed in a nearby farm field. One mobile home was shifted on the foundation, but did not overturn due to proper anchoring. Tree branch damage in this vicinity showed different

directions to the damage along with twisting, which was evidence of rotation. Roof damage to another mobile home near this location was evident and the roof was lofted about a tenth of a mile downstream into a farm field.

The next damage was uphill at a farm, where a storage outbuilding had damage to the roof. The rooftop was lofted in the air over several pieces of farm equipment, split in two, and the two pieces of roofing material landed in two different locations (one to the

east, and the other in a more southeasterly direction). Some debris was lofted downstream into nearby fields along Belcher Road, where there were isolated trees uprooted as well.

The storm then crossed Little Muddy Creek toward Richland Church Road where several large branches to trees along the road were snapped. From this point, there was no additional damage observed.

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.