EF0 tornado, Milford, Arkansas, May 5, 2024

1. EF065 to 85 mphthis tornado

   Light damage. Surface peeled off some roofs, gutters and siding damaged, branches broken, shallow-rooted trees pushed over.

2. EF186 to 110 mph

   Moderate damage. Roofs badly stripped, mobile homes overturned or badly damaged, exterior doors lost, windows broken.

3. EF2111 to 135 mph

   Considerable damage. Roofs torn off well-built houses, frame homes shifted on their foundations, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, cars lifted off the ground.

4. EF3136 to 165 mph

   Severe damage. Whole stories of well-built houses destroyed, large buildings badly damaged, trains overturned, trees debarked, heavy cars lifted and thrown.

5. EF4166 to 200 mph

   Devastating damage. Well-built houses leveled, structures with weak foundations moved some distance, cars thrown and large missiles generated.

6. EF5over 200 mph

   Incredible damage. Strong frame houses swept off their foundations, car-sized missiles thrown more than 100 meters, steel-reinforced concrete badly damaged, high-rise buildings deformed.

7. Unrated

   The survey recorded a tornado but could not put a number on it, most often because it crossed open country and damaged nothing a rating can be read from.

Rating

EF0

Date

May 5, 2024

Touchdown

6:45 PM CDT (23:45 UTC)

Lifted

6:47 PM CDT (23:47 UTC)

On the ground

2 minutes

Path length

0.5 miles (0.9 km)

Path width

20 yards (18 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

Property damage

$500

County

Sevier County

Touchdown point

33.942, -94.112

Lift-off point

33.945, -94.103

Record number

2405051745-01

3 damage points were recorded along this path by NWS SHV, in the Damage Assessment Toolkit the survey teams carry. The strongest indicator was rated EF0. The highest wind the damage implies is 65 mph.

• A small portion of a roof from a detached carport was torn off. The carport was mostly rotten and not very structurally sound.
• A large limb was snapped off of a hardwood tree along TJ King Road. No other damage was noted to trees nearby.

Survey points are preliminary and are the raw material the published rating was built from. Source: NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit.

Clearing in the wake of earlier convection on May 5th allowed for air mass recovery across North Louisiana and South Arkansas. Persistent low-level theta-e advection in advance of a weak surface low across Northeast Texas enabled storm redevelopment later in the afternoon, within an effective warm frontal zone. With some mid-level drying in the wake of an ejecting shortwave trough across Arkansas, thunderstorm intensity was uncertain. However, increasing moisture and instability along with relatively favorable low-level shear was sufficient to support brief tornado potential with any longer-lived thunderstorms late in the afternoon into early evening. One such thunderstorm produced a brief landspout tornado in Sevier County Arkansas where some minor damage was observed.

A brief landspout tornado was captured on video briefly touching down along Red Colony Road several miles southeast of Lockesburg, where it snapped small branches and tore off a small portion of the roof of a poorly constructed detached exterior carport. A few shingles were also removed from the the roof of an adjacent single family home. The landspout then crossed a hay meadow and snapped a small limb off of a hardwood tree before lifting along TJ King Road. Estimated maximum winds were 65 mph.

From NOAA NCEI's Storm Events Database, the narrative the local forecast office wrote for Storm Data.

No tornado warning for this county appears in the archive as in force at the moment the tornado touched down.

Every warning and watch covering the touchdown point that day, from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of National Weather Service products. Lead time is measured from the issue of the warning in force to the touchdown time in the database, both of which were recorded to the minute by different people.

The Storm Prediction Center had this point in a Marginal Risk, with a 0.02 chance of a tornado within 25 miles. The outlook in force was issued at 19:51 UTC.

SPC's Day 1 convective outlook as it stood when the tornado began, read at the touchdown point. The same archive is on the radar archive.

The radiosonde launches on either side of the tornado, from the nearest station that was launching then, drawn and analyzed the way Storm Lab does: the same diagram, the same parcel and shear definitions SPC's mesoanalysis uses.

The Western Arkansas radar (KSRX), 152 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 23:45 UTC.

Open the radar archive at this moment, over the track

Reflectivity and velocity, decoded from the Level II archive in the browser. Volumes take a few seconds to open the first time.

Local storm reports within 60 km of the path, in the three hours either side.

From the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of National Weather Service local storm reports.

The live radar over the trackEvery 2024 tornado in ArkansasEvery tornado in Arkansas since 1950Warnings in force in Arkansas nowThe forecast where you are

Ratings are the survey's, read off the damage rather than measured; the rating scale is above. Tornado counts rise through the record as reporting improved, so a year in the 1950s is not comparable with one today except for the strongest tornadoes, which were always noticed.

NOAA Storm Prediction Center tornado database, 1950-2025, the official record kept by NOAA's Storm Prediction Center.