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EF0 tornado in Graves County, Kentucky

Tornado April 26, 2017 · Graves County, Kentucky

EF0

Rating

12.3 mi

Whole path

100 yd

Path width

$500K

Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Hickman County → Graves County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 100 yards (0.06 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

The tornado crossed from Hickman County into Graves County about one mile north of Highway 58. The tornado weakened somewhat as it crossed into Graves County, where the damage track became more intermittent. Peak winds in the Graves County portion of the track were estimated just above 80 mph. Most of the damage was concentrated in Hickman County. Much of the structural damage in the Graves County portion of the path was along Highway 339, where a barn was heavily damaged. Otherwise, the damage along the Graves County portion of the track consisted mostly of some uprooted trees and broken branches. Trees were uprooted along U.S. Highway 45 near Pryorsburg. Four eyewitnesses reported seeing the tornado near Fulgham in Hickman County.

The wider storm

Temperatures warmed into the 80's ahead of a line of thunderstorms over northwest Tennessee and the Missouri Bootheel. The line of storms became severe as it moved rapidly northeast across the Purchase area of western Kentucky. The storms formed ahead of a cold front that extended southward from a low pressure center over the St. Louis area. A combination of moderate instability, sufficient wind shear, and steep low-level lapse rates supported locally damaging winds and an isolated tornado with these storms.

Began near Baltimore (36.6717, -88.8166).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 685930. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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