F1 tornado, White Rock, Michigan, May 12, 2000

1. F040 to 72 mph

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

2. F173 to 112 mphthis tornado

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

3. F2113 to 157 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. F3158 to 206 mph

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

5. F4207 to 260 mph

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

6. F5261 to 318 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

F1

Date

May 12, 2000

Touchdown

7:50 PM EDT (23:50 UTC)

Path length

0.3 miles (0.5 km)

Path width

170 yards (155 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

Property damage

$60,000

County

Huron County

Touchdown point

43.730, -82.620

Lift-off point

43.730, -82.600

Record number

212

A warm front moved north across lower Michigan on the 12th, ushering in another warm, muggy, unstable air mass. Thunderstorms developed northeast of Grand Rapids in the afternoon, then moved east toward the Saginaw Valley and Thumb areas. One storm evolved into a classic supercell, producing baseball sized hail from just east of Bay City to near Sebewaing. The supercell continued east across Huron County, and produced the first tornado of the severe weather season a few miles north of White Rock. Many trees were downed near the Lake Huron shoreline, with some downed onto homes. A storage shed was blown into a neighbor's yard, a swimming pool was destroyed, and several canoes were damaged.Several other storms moved across Huron County, dumping up to 5 inches of rain in some parts of the county. Flash flooding resulted in the Pigeon/Elkton area. A trailer park in Elkton had to be evacuated as the Pinnebog River quickly rose out of its banks. Water rose as high as the electric meters on some of the mobile homes. High water lingered in the county through the night, with flooding along the Willow River in Bloomfield Township (Redman Road was closed for a time), and street flooding in Harbor Beach.Additional storms developed further south in the evening, and moved east across metro Detroit. These storms produced marginally severe hail, and sporadic wind damage in the form of downed trees and power lines.

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

36 minutes of warning. NWS DTX issued a tornado warning for this county at 23:14 UTC, 36 minutes before the tornado touched down, in force until 00:00 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 Slight Risk. The outlook in force was issued at 20:25 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 Detroit radar (KDTX), 134 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 23:51 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.

The live radar over the trackEvery 2000 tornado in MichiganEvery tornado in Michigan since 1950Warnings in force in Michigan nowThe forecast where you are

11 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.