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EF0 tornado in Hopkins County, Kentucky

Tornado February 29, 2012 · Hopkins County, Kentucky

EF0
Rating
0.5 mi
Path length
30 yd
Path width
$10K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 30 yards (0.02 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF0 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF0 is light damage: shingles and siding peeled, gutters torn, branches broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 65–85 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

A trained spotter reported a tornado on the ground near exit 44 along the Pennyrile Parkway.

The wider storm

A squall line with embedded sustained supercells entered western Kentucky early in the morning. The embedded supercells raced east-northeast at 60 to 70 mph, while the line moved southeast at a slower rate. The storms strengthened as they encountered richer low-level moisture, with surface dew points around 60 degrees spreading rapidly north-northeastward up the Mississippi Valley. Intense low to mid-level wind fields maintained the intensity of tornadic storms despite weak instability due to lack of solar heating. A south-southwesterly low level jet from 60 to 70 knots veered to west-southwest around 75 knots at 500 mb. By mid-morning, the solid squall line evolved into a broken line of discrete storms over the Pennyrile region and Kentucky Lake region. While these discrete storms maintained severe levels, their tornado production decreased.

Began near Madisonville (37.3434, -87.4930).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

3 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 359737. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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