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EF2 tornado in Benton County, Tennessee

Tornado March 2, 2020 · Benton County, Tennessee

EF2
Rating
18.7 mi
Whole path
250 yd
Path width
1
Death
2
Injuries
$1.1M
Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Benton County → Humphreys County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 250 yards (0.14 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF2 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF2 is considerable damage: roofs torn off well-built houses, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, consistent with estimated gusts of 111–135 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

The tornado started in Benton County northwest of Camden and caused a substantial amount of tree damage along the path the extended into the Tennessee River. Several homes and mobile homes were damaged along the path in Benton County. The most damage, in Benton County, was in the Ballard Road area. Peak winds were estimated around 125 mph. The tornado then moved across the Tennessee River and into Humphreys County.

The wider storm

A surface low tracked along a warm front stretched just north of the Mid-South. Meanwhile, a potent upper-level disturbance tracked into the region increasing wind fields and triggering thunderstorms along the warm front and south of the front, in the warm sector, during the late evening hours of March 2, 2020. A couple of supercells tracked across the Missouri Bootheel and northwest Tennessee during the late evening hours. One supercell spawned three tornadoes across Gibson, Carroll, and Benton counties. A few severe storms also developed along a trailing cold front across eastern Arkansas and West Tennessee during the early morning hours of March 3, 2020.

Began near Liberty (36.0928, -88.1189).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

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

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 880546. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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