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EF0 tornado in Ware County, Georgia

Tornado April 23, 2020 · Ware County, Georgia

EF0
Rating
9.0 mi
Path length
50 yd
Path width
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 50 yards (0.03 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

Around 205 pm EDT, a tornado was reported along Clough Bay Road North in Ware county about 2 miles SSE of Waresboro. GEMA coordinator relayed that there were 15 structure damaged by the tornado in Ware county, with 4 of the structures having minor damage and 6 with major damage. There were 1400 totoal without power. At 219 pm, law enforcment reported a tornado in Pierce county first moving in from the west near Highway 84 and the Sunnyside area, traveling along St. Johns Church Road and Riggins Road into the march northeast of Rigggins Road. The path was about 9 miles and the tornado was on the ground from 2:19 to 2:28 pm. Widespread tree damage occurred, billboards were destroyed and there was roof damage along the path.

The wider storm

A very active weather pattern occurred across the area during the afternoon and lasted overnight as a couple of pre-frontal troughs pivoted across the local bringing a couple rounds of severe storms as the surface low pressure center tracked over the mid-Mississippi Valley during the morning then over the Tennessee Valley into the afternoon. Phased upper level dynamics, an unseasonally moisture airmass, high shear including 0-6 km shear of 60-70 and 0-1 km shear of 20-30, high instability of 500-2000 J/kg surface CAPEs and steep mid level lapse rates near 7 deg C/km all supported a variety of weather threats as these prefrontal troughs moved across the local area. During the afternoon, a pre-frontal cluster of storms raced across SE GA with a very long lived supercell producing multiple tornadoes from across SW GA including Adel to a local touchdown near northern Clinch county near Cogdell then onward to Waycross. This same supercell continued to track NE toward Glynn county and the cities of Hortense and Sterling where it produced very strong downburst damage. During the evening hours, an outflow boundary from the earlier GA storms stalled across NE FL south of the I-10 corridor. The more unstable airmass was south of this boundary as yet another round of severe storms approached from the FL panhandle with a QLCS structure. These storms produced wind damage across NE FL as they tracked across the area through the evening and early morning hours through 4/24.

Began near Waresboro (31.2200, -82.4700).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

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

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 879279. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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