EF1 tornado, Dalesburg, Kentucky, July 14, 2015

1. EF065 to 85 mph

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

2. EF186 to 110 mphthis tornado

   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

EF1

Date

July 14, 2015

Touchdown

5:38 PM EDT (21:38 UTC)

Lifted

5:39 PM EDT (21:39 UTC)

On the ground

1 minutes

Path length

0.5 miles (0.8 km)

Path width

200 yards (183 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

Property damage

$50,000

County

Fleming County

Touchdown point

38.458, -83.697

Lift-off point

38.462, -83.689

Record number

1507141538-01

17 damage points were recorded along this path by NWS JKL, in the Damage Assessment Toolkit the survey teams carry. The strongest indicator was rated EF1. The highest wind the damage implies is 100 mph.

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

The second of three rounds of severe weather arrived shortly after midnight on July 14th as a complex of thunderstorms barreled southeastward into east Kentucky. This complex of storms produced sporadic wind damage and some flash flooding through the morning hours, hitting the Upper Cumberland region of south central and southeast Kentucky the hardest. ||Round three arrived as a line of strong to severe storms dropped southward across the region during the late afternoon and evening hours of the 14th. Once again, wind damage was widespread and numerous locations experienced flash flooding due to torrential rainfall rates and already saturated ground. ||A 6.5 mile long swath of concentrated wind damage occurred north of Flemingsburg during the late afternoon of the 14th. This demolished a mobile home and injured four people as winds reached 100 mph. An EF1 tornado touched down briefly inside this larger path of damaging straight-line winds. ||All in all, there were around 200 different severe weather (flash flood, wind damage, hail greater than 1 in diameter, and/or tornado) reports called into the National Weather Service office in Jackson, KY for the 36 hour period ending midnight Tuesday night. At one point, over 50,000 east Kentucky households were without power due to the storms with many remaining without power through Friday July 17th.

An EF1 tornado with 100 mph winds touched down on a farm off Harn Road around 3 miles northeast of Flemingsburg. The tornado damaged or destroyed barns and shoved a mobile home several feet off its foundation while ripping the roof off of the structure. The tornado touched down within a 6.5 mile swath of 80-100 mph straight line winds.

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.

The county was under a severe thunderstorm watch, issued at 21:10 UTC and running to 01:01 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 Enhanced Risk, with a 0.05 chance of a tornado within 25 miles. The outlook in force was issued at 19:55 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 Jackson,KY radar (KJKL), 102 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 21:37 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 2015 tornado in KentuckyEvery tornado in Kentucky since 1950Warnings in force in Kentucky nowThe forecast where you are

9 more were confirmed in the United States that day.

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.