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EF0 tornado in Fresno County, California

Tornado February 12, 2018 · Fresno County, California

EF0
Rating
0.3 mi
Path length
20 yd
Path width
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 20 yards (0.01 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 tornado briefly touched down in rural farmland between Riverbend Ave. and Goodfellow Ave. southeast of Sanger and was captured on video and relayed to the NWS by a media source.

The wider storm

High pressure brought a prolonged period of unseasonably warm temperatures to begin February as temperatures were 10 degrees or more above seasonal normals across much of the are for the first 10 days of the month. A low pressure system dropping into the Great Basin on the 10th brought a period of increased winds to the Kern County Mountains and Deserts during the late morning and early afternoon as strong mid level winds mixed down to the surface where there were numerous reports of gusts between 45 and 50 mph. Another trough pushed through the Great Basin on the evening of the 11th through the morning of the 12th which pushed a cold front through Central California and brought another period of increased winds to the area and there were several reports of wind gusts between 50 and 55 mp in the Kern County Mountains and Deserts. this system also brought some light precipitation to the area with amounts generally less than a tenth of an inch of liquid precipitation in post-frontal showers on the 12th. A weak tornado briefly touched down in rural farmland near Sanger during the late morning of the 12th.

Began near Parlier (36.6685, -119.5134).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 731511. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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