Thunderstorm Wind in Bullitt County, Kentucky

The National Weather Service conducted a storm damage survey on Monday, March 16th for the storms that occurred on Sunday night, March 15th.

The starting point was on the north side of Lebanon Junction where a large old softwood tree fell onto a pickup truck at a residence along state highway 61. More damage was surveyed approximately 1.5 miles ESE of Lebanon Junction along S Sanders Ln where a couple of older softwood trees again had fallen.

The next report was along Ridge Rd / CR 1442 approximately 4.5 miles SW of Mt Washington where several large softwood trees fell on power lines causing on power pole to snap and another to become uprooted.

Further downstream along the storm path, a cluster of damage along Armstrong Ln consisted of several downed trees and metal roofing stripped off of barns/garages. Some of the metal roofing panels were blown into tree tops and twisted onto power lines.

A half mile north on Armstrong Ln was another instance of several large softwood trees that had been knocked down causing damage to a chained link fence.

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.