EF2 tornado in Cherokee County, North Carolina

Tornado March 2, 2012 · Cherokee County, North Carolina

EF2

Rating

21.5 mi

Path length

400 yd

Path width

$2.0M

Damage as recorded

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 400 yards (0.23 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF2 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF2 is considerable damage: roofs torn off well-built houses, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, consistent with estimated gusts of 111–135 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

An EF-2 tornado with maximum wind speeds around 120 mph produced a damage path

21.5 miles long and 400 yards wide. The tornado track extended across almost the entire county and damaged the northern part of Murphy. The storm destroyed five homes and five businesses. The number of structures affected totaled one hundred eighteen. In Murphy, a Feed Store and two rows of commercial storage units were destoyed. Also, a shopping strip with a Sherwin-Williams store suffered heavy damage.

Surprisingly there were no injuries reported despite the heavy damage and long track.

The wider storm

A deepening low pressure system moved northeast from the Mid Mississippi Valley through the Great Lakes initially driving a warm front northward through the Southern Appalachian region through the afternoon. The associated cold front swept across the area late Friday night. A one hundred knot upper level jet positioned over a 50 knot low level jet resulted in a strongly sheared environment. The intense shear and moderate instability produced an atmosphere conducive to long-lived, discrete, supercell thunderstorms across the region. One of these storms moved across Southwest North Carolina producing an EF-2 tornado in Murphy during the evening.

Began near Postell (35.0945, -84.2639).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 366756. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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