Home / Florida / Manatee

EF0 tornado in Manatee County, Florida

Tornado July 31, 2017 · Manatee County, Florida

EF0

Rating

0.7 mi

Path length

100 yd

Path width

$96K

Damage as recorded

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

Tropical Storm Emily came ashore in the area with a broad area of toppled trees and numerous branches downed. An NWS Storm Survey team found a narrow area of enhanced damage, likely associated with a brief tornado. Two barns were destroyed along with multiple greenhouses and a engineered wall was found toppled.

The wider storm

Tropical Storm Emily formed on the tail-end of a slow moving frontal boundary that was draped across the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. A weak area of low pressure developed on the 30th and slowly drifted southeast towards the Florida peninsula. Early in the morning on the 31st, satellite and radar data indicated that a tropical depression had formed about 65 miles west of Tampa Bay. The system became a tropical storm shortly before landfall just a few hours later. Emily made landfall on Anna Maria Island at 10:45 AM with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph and a minimum central pressure of 1005 mb.

Emily was a small system and it's effects were very localized across the region. It produced one tornado along the Manatee county coast and wind gusts were observed in the 40 to 65 mph range across Pinellas, Manatee and Sarasota Counties. Emily produced areas of 4-6 inches of rain across portions of west central Florida.

Began near Palma Sola (27.5100, -82.6600).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 705836. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

Tornadoes near your address

See every tornado that passed near a place you know, measured to its path.