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EF0 tornado in McKinley County, New Mexico

Tornado February 17, 2019 · McKinley County, New Mexico

EF0
Rating
0.2 mi
Path length
30 yd
Path width
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

An observer captured a convective snow shower producing a weak landspout tornado, or snowspout, several miles over extreme eastern McKinley County. No damage was reported.

The wider storm

An unstable airmass ahead of an approaching winter storm produced scattered snow showers over northwestern New Mexico on February 17, 2019. A convective snow shower that developed over eastern McKinley County produced a brief landspout tornado several miles south of Ojo Encino. Footage of the snowspout showed a well defined funnel mixing snow from the surface several hundred feet into the air. No damage occurred due to this weak tornado. This was the first tornado reported in the state of New Mexico in the month of February.

Began near Hospah (35.8564, -107.3150).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 797836. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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