EF0 tornado, Advance, Illinois, March 11, 2026

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, as surveyed

EF0, preliminary

Date

March 11, 2026

Touchdown

6:10 AM CDT (11:10 UTC)

Lifted

6:12 AM CDT (11:12 UTC)

On the ground

2 minutes

Path length

2.1 miles (3.3 km)

Path width

50 yards (46 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

County

Jasper County

Touchdown point

39.144, -88.034

Lift-off point

39.154, -88.006

Highest wind the damage implies

85 mph

Surveyed by

NWS ILX

The office's name for it

Yale Tornado

Survey last edited

March 12, 2026

Record number

None yet. SPC numbers 2026 in the spring of 2027.

A tornado touched down about 2 miles northwest of Yale where it did some tree damage, then progressed to the northeast where it destroyed a barn near the intersection of 2100E and 2000N. The tornado dissipated shortly after.

Written by NWS ILX in the NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit. A survey is revised as better evidence arrives.

2 damage points were recorded along this path by NWS ILX, in the Damage Assessment Toolkit the survey teams carry. The strongest indicator was rated EF0. The highest wind the damage implies is 85 mph.

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

A warm front lifted northward through central Illinois on March 10th, allowing temperatures to soar into the upper 70s and lower 80s. Record highs were established at Springfield (84 degrees), Peoria (83 degrees), and Lincoln (82 degrees)...all topping their previous highs set back in 1955. As an upper-level disturbance tracked eastward out of the Plains and interacted with the departing front, scattered supercell thunderstorms developed along and north of a Macomb to Pontiac line during the late afternoon. Some of these cells dropped giant hail (over 4 inches in diameter) across the southern part of the NWS Chicago County Warning Area (CWA). Further south in the NWS Lincoln coverage zone, the storms spawned 3 tornadoes across parts of Knox, Stark, and Marshall counties. After these initial cells tracked further northeast out of the area, a line of thunderstorms formed along an advancing cold front across the Illinois River Valley by late evening...with the storms eventually dropping south of the I-70 corridor toward daybreak on March 11th. The line initially produced a downburst with 80-90mph winds in Havana in Mason County, as well as 2 tornadoes further east in rural Mason County. Closer to sunrise, an additional tornado touched down near Yale in Jasper County before the storms exited into Indiana.

A tornado touched down northeast of the intersection of North 1800th Street and East 2000th Avenue about 2 miles north-northwest of Yale at 6:10 AM CDT. The tornado tracked northeastward, damaging trees and destroying a barn south of the intersection of North 2000th Street and East 2100th Avenue before dissipating at 6:12 AM CDT.

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

15 minutes of warning. NWS ILX issued a tornado warning for this county at 10:55 UTC, 15 minutes before the tornado touched down, in force until 11:16 UTC.

The county was under a tornado watch, issued at 10:23 UTC and running to 12:30 UTC.

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. The outlook in force was issued at 05:29 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 Evansville,IN radar (KVWX), 102 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 11:11 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 2026 tornado in IllinoisEvery tornado in Illinois since 1950Warnings in force in Illinois nowThe forecast where you are

56 more have been surveyed in the United States that day, so far.

Ratings are the survey's, read off the damage rather than measured; the rating scale is above. A survey can be revised, so the rating, the path and the casualties can all still change.

NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit, the record the survey teams file from the damage, and NOAA Storm Prediction Center storm reports. Neither is the official database for 2026, which SPC publishes in the spring of 2027.