The Greensburg tornado of May 4, 2007

EF5  Comanche and Kiowa counties, Kansas · surveyed by NWS Dodge City and three independent engineering teams

At a quarter to ten on a Friday night in May, a tornado 1.7 miles wide entered the south side of Greensburg, Kansas, a town of about 1,400 people on U.S. 54, and left by the northwest corner nine minutes later. It destroyed 95 percent of the town. Eleven people died, which the meteorologists who studied it afterwards put in quotation marks, because the warning had been on the air for 26 minutes and a tornado emergency for four, and because the storm that produced it went on to produce two more tornadoes nearly as large. It was the first tornado rated EF5 on the scale that had replaced Fujita's three months earlier, and the Dodge City radar recorded in it a vortex with the size of a mesocyclone and the winds of a tornado.

Aerial view of downtown Greensburg, Kansas twelve days after the tornado: roofless brick commercial buildings along the highway, cranes, flattened houses and stripped trees stretching to the prairie beyond.
Downtown, twelve days on. The center of Greensburg on May 16, 2007, looking north across U.S. 54. Photo: Greg Henshall, FEMA, public domain.
Rating
EF5 205 mph estimated; the first EF5
Path length
28.8 mi 3 in Comanche County, 25.8 in Kiowa
Max width
1.7 mi 3,000 yd, south of Greensburg
Touchdown
9:00 pm CDT Comanche County; in town 9:45
Forward speed
~20 mph
Deaths
11 12 counting Pratt County, see text
Injuries
63 90 treated in hospitals
Damage
$250M 2007 USD
Radar
KDDC 38 mi; no dual-pol yet
Warning lead
26 min warned 9:19 pm, emergency 9:41
Watch
Tornado Watch 227 from 6:15 pm CDT
Supercell
20+ tornadoes four of them large and long-tracked

The setup

The Storm Prediction Center had a moderate risk on the map more than a day ahead, and on the morning of May 4 gave the region a 15 percent tornado probability; its 11:26 am outlook called "strong tornadoes certainly a possibility" in western Kansas.[5][10] By evening a surface low near 994 mb sat over southeast Colorado, CAPE near Dodge City was about 5,100 J/kg, and 0–6 km shear was 34 m/s. What changed after dark was the low-level jet: winds at 500 m and 1 km roughly doubled to 15 m/s from the south-southeast after 7 pm, and storm-relative helicity in the lowest kilometer rose from under 100 to nearly 200 m²/s² by the time the tornado formed, and kept rising.[6][8]

The storm's ancestry is the strangest thing about it. Howard Bluestein traced the Greensburg supercell back to a single cell that formed in the northeast Texas Panhandle just before 5 pm and produced two tornadoes near Arnett, Oklahoma. That cell split, and its left-moving offspring split again, and again; "left-split cells were the dominant mode of deep convection for the day" until about 7:30 pm. The Greensburg storm was "the 14th in a sequence of splitting storms," a cell that formed atypically on the southwest flank of one of them and took an hour to become a tornadic supercell. Bluestein suggested a second title for his paper: "Does the formation of an isolated cell in the Texas Panhandle near the dryline set off a tornado in Kansas?" His conclusion was that "both extreme sensitivity to initial conditions associated with storm formation and the uncertainty of storm behavior made it unusually difficult to forecast this event accurately."[8]

Once isolated, the storm behaved like a textbook. The Dodge City radar saw its first mesocyclone at 7:50 pm, six kilometers up, with the storm 76 km away over Harper County, Oklahoma; a bounded weak echo region by 8:06; and by 8:20, with inflow above 25 m/s on its southern flank, the storm had slowed to 12 m/s and split off a left mover to the north. Between 8:32 and 8:56 it produced four small tornadoes "cyclically and in pairs" between Sitka and Greensburg. The fifth formed at 9:00 pm.[6][7][8]

The warning

Mike Umscheid, the warning forecaster at Dodge City that night, warned Clark and Comanche counties at 8:13 pm, and at 8:55 pm extended the warning to southwestern Kiowa County with a line that reads in retrospect like a forecast: "VERY STRONG ROTATION WAS INDICATED ON RADAR AND A LARGE TORNADO MAY BE DEVELOPING."[4] At 9:19 pm came the warning for all of Kiowa County: "NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE METEOROLOGISTS WERE TRACKING A CONFIRMED LARGE AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TORNADO 14 MILES SOUTH OF GREENSBURG ... MOVING NORTHEAST AT 25 MPH. LOCATIONS IMPACTED INCLUDE... GREENSBURG." At 9:41 pm the office issued a statement it had rarely used: "A VIOLENT TORNADO WAS ON A DIRECT PATH FOR PORTIONS OF GREENSBURG... THIS IS AN EMERGENCY SITUATION FOR GREENSBURG," headed "TORNADO EMERGENCY FOR GREENSBURG." At 9:50, with the tornado "2 MILES SOUTH OF GREENSBURG... MOVING NORTHEAST AT 30 MPH," the warning was extended into Edwards County.[4]

The town's sirens sounded about 20 minutes before the tornado arrived. The NWS's own reckoning is 26 minutes of lead time from the 9:19 warning to the tornado's entry at 9:45.[1][14] Leslie Lemon and Umscheid wrote afterwards that "'Only' 11 fatalities occurred, however, due largely in part by excellent, timely warnings from a small team of meteorologists" at Dodge City.[6] A high-school senior named Megan Gardiner, whose account the two later used to time the tornado's passage, had seen a warning saying the tornado would be in Greensburg by 9:50.[6]

Chronology

Times are CDT (UTC−5); the radar and the papers use UTC, which is the next day.

Nine minutes in Greensburg

The count afterwards: 961 homes and businesses destroyed, 216 with major damage, 307 with minor; the water tower down, the hospital, the high school and the elementary school wrecked; 800,000 cubic yards of debris hauled away in nearly 40,000 truckloads.[1] The state's list of Kansas tornadoes puts it at "95% of Greensburg" destroyed.[2] "First responders arriving on the scene requested three refrigerated reefer trucks thinking there would be hundreds of fatalities," the official record notes.[3]

Aerial view of a Greensburg residential grid three days after the tornado: houses reduced to walls or slabs, stripped trees, debris across every lot, and vehicles along the streets.
The residential grid, May 7. Seen from the air on the day FEMA's director and the governor toured the town. Photo: Michael Raphael, FEMA, public domain.
A two-story house with its roof torn open and debarked trees in front, behind piles of splintered lumber, photographed on May 12, 2007.
A house on May 12. Homes that lost their entire roof outnumbered those that lost part of it by more than two to one. Photo: Michael Raphael, FEMA, public domain.[9]

There were eleven dead in the town by the National Weather Service's count, and "some of those fatalities were in basements that unfortunately were filled with a tremendous amount of debris."[1] Area hospitals treated 90 patients within a day; an epidemiological study found critical mortality of 18 percent and concluded that "advanced warning and personal preparedness are important factors in reducing tornado-related injuries and deaths."[11] The city's own count of the night is 12, adding the man killed by the Hopewell tornado in Pratt County; a 13th is sometimes added for Stafford County. The Storm Prediction Center's quick response team counted "ten people in the town" and thirteen for the outbreak.[10][14]

"What you could hear was the wind coming, and you could hear the house being pulled apart."

Ferrell Allison, Greensburg resident, to KCUR, 2017[17]
Greensburg High School with its brick upper walls broken away and orange steel roof trusses exposed, a fallen pine in front and debris on the lawn.
Greensburg High School. The three-wythe unreinforced masonry walls "failed about hinge lines that occurred at the level of the window sills"; the surveyors rated the building EF4. Photo: Michael Raphael, FEMA, May 16, 2007, public domain.[9]

The radar record

KDDC at Dodge City watched the tornado from about 62 km, 38 miles, with its lowest beam roughly 790 m above the ground over Greensburg, a range Lemon and Umscheid note was "about double the distance" from which KTLX had watched the 1999 Oklahoma City tornado. The dual-polarisation upgrade was still four years away, so there is no debris signature to show, only reflectivity and velocity. Both are extreme. At 9:04 pm the vortex column already extended "from radar horizon to storm summit which is ~16 km altitude," with gate-to-gate velocity differences of 57 to 67 m/s throughout. By 9:38 pm "the Delta-V is over ~100 m s-1 (~200 kts) at the radar horizon," and the Doppler circulation had a core "between 2.4 and 3.0 km" across.[6]

Radar reflectivity from KDDC showing a large supercell over Kiowa County, Kansas, its red core stretching from Mullinville past Haviland, with a magenta gate at the west edge of Greensburg and a hook curling toward the town from the southwest.
Reflectivity, 9:45 pm CDT (02:45 UTC), KDDC, 0.5°. The moment the tornado entered town. The hook curls up from Mullinville toward Greensburg, and the single magenta gate, above 70 dBZ, sits on the town's south-west edge: debris. The storm's core extends twenty miles east past Haviland. KDDC lies off the frame to the upper left.
Radar velocity from KDDC showing a tight pairing of bright orange outbound and cyan inbound returns just south-southeast of Greensburg, Kansas, with broad green inflow across the county.
Velocity, 9:45 pm CDT, KDDC, 0.5°. The radar is to the west-northwest, so green is air moving toward it and red and orange away. The orange arc immediately south-southeast of Greensburg is outbound flow above 100 mph wrapped against inbound cyan: the tornado cyclone, two to three kilometers across, on the edge of town. Lemon and Umscheid's dealiased peak in this circulation was 70.5 m/s, 158 mph, and they judged the true tangential wind 30 to 40 percent higher.
Radar reflectivity from KDDC four minutes later, with a magenta gate now directly over Greensburg and the hook's tip on the town.
Reflectivity, 9:50 pm CDT, KDDC, 0.5°. Four minutes on, the magenta gate is over Greensburg itself. This is the scan during which the Gardiner family, in a basement later rated EF5, felt the pressure drop and heard the windows go.

Replay the tornado's approach and the strike on Greensburg on KDDC, reflectivity and velocity side by side, from its wedge stage south of town.

Open in the archive

What KDDC could not measure it inferred. Its velocities "are power weighted and represent the mean velocity of the largest debris within each pulse volume," so Lemon and Umscheid took them to be "conservatively in the range of 30% to 40% too low" and concluded "the actual tangential TC or tornadic velocity may be ~90 m s-1 to 100 m s-1 or 175 to 200 kts. This is consistent with the EF5 damage rating." The chaotic velocities inside the core suggested "a number of sub-vortices." And there was a hole: a column of weak reflectivity inside the vortex, "an inverted cone that is broad aloft and narrowing downward," reaching in one scan to the storm's summit, which they attributed to the centrifuging of rain, hail and debris. Their verdict on what the radar was seeing: "These vortex signatures had the scale of the mesocyclone but had mean tangential velocity values of a true tornado."[6]

A second radar saw the tornado's growth from much closer and missed its climax. The University of Massachusetts X-band polarimetric radar, parked 4 km east of Protection, collected 539 sweeps between 8:24 and 9:34 pm and detected ten tornadoes, including "the genesis through mature stages of the Greensburg tornado," with outbound velocities "sometimes exceeding 80 m s-1" and a debris column that "gradually widened, becoming 4-5 km in diameter" by the end of the data, wider than the damage path below it. Then the truck's battery died. "No UMass X-Pol data were collected during the exact time period when tornado 5 severely damaged Greensburg."[7]

The first EF5

The Enhanced Fujita scale had been in use since February 1, 2007. Three teams surveyed Greensburg on the ground and, from the fifth day, from the air, and assigned ratings to 662 homes. "EF-5 ratings were given to anchored homes that were swept clean from their foundations." There were seven. "Peak implied wind speeds were 92 ms-1 near the center of the tornado path, making this the first EF-5 rated tornado using the new EF-Scale."[9] The NWS quick response team put it the same way: "the number of homes swept clean with little trace of debris led the team to the EF-5 rating with winds estimated between 200 mph and 210 mph."[10]

7 of 662 homes rated EF5 among those the survey assessed: 194 at EF0, 74 at EF1, 177 at EF2, 104 at EF3, 106 at EF4, and seven swept clean from anchored foundations Marshall et al. 2008. A further 53 homes slid off unanchored block foundations and were rated EF2 or by their neighbors.[9]

The survey's other findings describe what the scale can and cannot see. Damage was more severe east of the track than west. Of 39 manufactured homes in the path, 28 were destroyed, against 17 percent of site-built homes damaged past the point of protecting anyone inside: "This finding underscores the importance that manufactured homes are not safe havens in tornadoes." Of 370 vehicles, 166 "had not moved even when homes sustained EF-4 damage." At the hospital, rated EF3, a concrete beam weighing about 4,500 kg was lifted, and FEMA's engineers calculated 66 m/s to do it.[9] The 2025 review of why no EF5 followed for twelve years lists Greensburg's basis simply, "seven well-anchored homes swept clean," and notes that the early EF5 ratings were given "on the basis of damage to single-family homes without directly noting that these homes were built at standard construction codes."[12]

The loop, and what came after

As it left the town the tornado did something the official record describes as "a complete loop northwest of Greensburg," documented "on both high resolution doppler radar and through the ground survey."[3] On radar the occlusion began with the 9:38 pm scan; through the town the motion "had changed markedly to northwest," and the tornado "had begun to actually loop back on itself." As it shrank and died, the storm's circulation was already "strongly propagating toward the east southeast" into the birth of the next one.[6]

The Trousdale tornado formed as the Greensburg tornado dissipated, ran 65 minutes at EF3 and "quickly grew into a nearly 2 mile wide tornado," throwing a combine a quarter of a mile; the Hopewell tornado followed for 58 minutes and killed one person. In all the supercell produced more than 20 tornadoes over eight hours, "four of which were very large and long tracked," and kept a distinct updraft until 4 am.[1][3][6][7] Lemon and Umscheid, who had spent careers on such storms, wrote that "this storm was a storm of superlatives, a storm of extremes, and an occurrence that is rare," and, of its vortices, "It is apparent that the atmosphere knows nothing of our nomenclature but it does know intense vortices very well."[6]

Rebuilding green

President Bush declared the disaster on May 6 and visited on May 9; federal assistance passed $100 million.[13][14] The decision that defined the town's next decade was made in a tent. "I guess we were under the tent down by the courthouse probably," city council president John Janssen told NPR, "and we're sitting there going, 'You know, this is total devastation. We might as well do this right.'" Within about twelve hours, he said, Mayor Lonnie McCollum was telling a national television interviewer, "And by the way, we're gonna rebuild green."[15]

A glass-walled arts center with solar panels on poles in front and three small wind turbines beside it, the grain elevator behind, on a winter day.
The 5.4.7 Arts Center, 2009. Named for the date, with its own solar panels and wind turbines. Photo: Eric Ascalon, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
Greensburg's new white water tower above the round Big Well Museum building, with wind turbines and new houses on the skyline, May 2012.
Five years on, May 2012. The new water tower and the new Big Well Museum, which opened that month. Photo: Jeff Hutton, NWS Dodge City, public domain.[19]

The town rebuilt its hospital, its school, its city hall and its museum over the hand-dug well to high efficiency standards, and it powers itself from wind. It has not regained its people. Some 1,400 lived there before the storm; about 900 in 2010, about 800 in 2014, and 740 by the Census Bureau's latest count.[15][16][20] Daniel Wallach, who founded Greensburg GreenTown, told NPR in 2014: "The town is struggling. There's a lot of fear and concern in town, that it may not be sustainable as a community - ghost town. And some people in the community are blaming the green initiative itself, which is crazy."[16] Banker Tom Corns, three years later: "The tornado actually was like pruning a rosebush. We were already on a downhill slide before the tornado, as was every small town. Since then, it's a new town."[17] Superintendent Darin Headrick, interviewed in the rubble of his school in 2007, had put the bet plainly: "Towns are about people. They're not about buildings. And as long as the people are willing to stay, the way of life stays."[16]

"If that plant could grow through that, in Greensburg, I could. Here I am."

Sara Schmidt, whose husband of 54 years died in the tornado, to NPR, 2010[15]

Videos

Footage and retrospectives, all via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embeds.

The wedge by lightning. Dan Robinson's footage of the tornado at night.
The first EF5. KSN's retrospective on the night.
Seventeen years later. KWCH returns to Greensburg.
Going green. CBS Evening News on the rebuild.

Greensburg was measured against Bridge Creek-Moore at every turn: the same analog soundings, the same rating, and a radar comparison in which the Greensburg vortex came out larger. The scale it was the first to be rated on came out of arguments that began with Jarrell. For the EF5 that ended the drought Greensburg's own rating helped define, see Enderlin.

All tornado profiles · Search the radar archive by date and time · How to read reflectivity and velocity

Sources

Path length, width, deaths and the warning chronology follow NWS Dodge City; the death count's variants are given in the text. Radar figures are from Lemon and Umscheid 2008 unless stated. Times are CDT (UTC−5).

  1. NWS Dodge City, The Rebuilding of Greensburg, one year later, fact sheet, April 2008.
  2. NWS Wichita, Top Ten Kansas Tornadoes.
  3. NCEI Storm Events Database, 2007 bulk details file, events 35934 (Comanche County), 35937 (Kiowa County), 35995 (Trousdale), 35999 (Hopewell) and the satellite tornadoes 35989, 35992, 35994, 132162 to 132173, from ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/.
  4. Iowa Environmental Mesonet, archived NWS Dodge City warning text: 8:55 pm warning, 9:19 pm warning naming Greensburg, 9:41 pm tornado emergency, 9:50 pm warning, and the 8:13 pm warning.
  5. Storm Prediction Center, Tornado Watch 227, and Day 1 Convective Outlook, 1630 UTC, May 4, 2007.
  6. L. R. Lemon and M. Umscheid, The Greensburg, KS Tornadic Storm: A Storm of Extremes, 24th Conference on Severe Local Storms, 2008.
  7. R. L. Tanamachi, H. B. Bluestein, J. B. Houser, S. J. Frasier and K. M. Hardwick, Mobile, X-band, Polarimetric Doppler Radar Observations of the 4 May 2007 Greensburg, Kansas, Tornadic Supercell, Monthly Weather Review 140(7), 2012.
  8. H. B. Bluestein, The Formation and Early Evolution of the Greensburg, Kansas, Tornadic Supercell on 4 May 2007, Weather and Forecasting 24(4), 2009.
  9. T. P. Marshall, D. McCarthy, J. LaDue, J. Wurman, C. Alexander, P. Robinson and K. Kosiba, Damage Survey of the Greensburg, KS Tornado, 24th Conference on Severe Local Storms, 2008.
  10. D. McCarthy, L. Ruthi and J. Hutton, The Greensburg, KS Tornado, 22nd Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, 2007.
  11. E. Ablah, A. M. Tinius, K. Konda, C. Synovitz and R. Subbarao, Regional Health System Response to the 2007 Greensburg, Kansas, EF5 Tornado, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 1(2), 2007.
  12. A. W. Lyza, H. E. Brooks and M. J. Krocak, Where Have the EF5s Gone? A Closer Look at the "Drought" of the Most Violent Tornadoes in the United States, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 106, 2025.
  13. FEMA, disaster declaration DR-1699-KS, May 6, 2007, via the OpenFEMA API.
  14. City of Greensburg, The Greensburg tornado.
  15. A. Letson, Town Rebuilds Green After Devastating Tornado, NPR, May 14, 2010.
  16. F. Morris, Kansas Town Destroyed By Tornado Spreads Blame For Lack Of Growth, NPR, April 29, 2014.
  17. F. Morris, 10 Years After Devastating Tornado, Greensburg, Kansas, Struggles To Move Forward, KCUR, May 8, 2017.
  18. J. McLean, Leveled By A Tornado, A Small Kansas Town Dreamed Big And Got Even Smaller, KCUR, November 16, 2019.
  19. L. A. Stephens, How Greensburg rebuilt its tourist attraction, and itself, after a devastating tornado, KMUW, January 8, 2021.
  20. M. McCoy, May is peak tornado season. Here's to the chasers who bring us the ground truth of deadly storms, Kansas Reflector, May 3, 2026; and Wikipedia, 2007 Greensburg tornado, consulted September 2026, used as a finding aid.

Radar imagery on this page was rendered by WeatherOverTime from NOAA Level II data recorded by KDDC. Where sources disagree on a figure, the difference is noted in the text. Corrections: contact@weatherovertime.com.