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EF1 tornado in Marion County, Mississippi

Tornado December 16, 2019 · Marion County, Mississippi

EF1
Rating
6.2 mi
Path length
440 yd
Path width
$50K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 440 yards (0.25 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF1 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF1 is moderate damage: roofs badly stripped, mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned, windows broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 86–110 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

This tornado spawned from the same supercell that produced the Columbia tornado. This tornado touch down southeast of Highway 44 along Pierce Road snapping large tree limbs and uprooting softwood trees. It continued to uproot trees and snap large tree limbs as it progressed northeast to Kendrick Road and Improve Road where at the latter road, it also caused the collapse of a couple sheds. It lifted once it reached Christian Union Road, however not before removing some shingles from a single-story home. Maximum winds were 100 mph.

The wider storm

A well defined, positively-tilted trough existed across the Southern Plains and at the surface, a cold front was progressing across Arkansas and Louisiana, while an intensifying area of low pressure propagated northeast along the boundary. Discrete supercells developed in the morning on December 16 and moved northeast, spawning multiple strong tornadoes over northeast Louisiana and south Mississippi. These storms produced a total of 10 tornadoes.

Began near Columbia Marion Arpt (31.2824, -89.7682).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

10 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

EF3 Smith CountyEF3 Lamar CountyEF3 Jones CountyEF3 Lincoln CountyEF2 Franklin CountyEF2 Lawrence CountyEF2 Marion CountyEF1 Claiborne CountyEF1 Warren CountyEF0 Lincoln County

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 865245. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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