Tornadoes · United States · Ohio · 2006
F0 tornado, Deerfield, Ohio, July 4, 2006
This F0 tornado ran 1.5 miles across Portage County on July 4, 2006, touching down at 4:30 PM EDT and reaching 25 yards wide. It killed nobody, and did $30,000 of property damage.
The rating scale
Tracks are drawn in the color of the rating. The Fujita scale rates the damage rather than measuring the wind: the speeds are what that damage is taken to imply.
F040 to 72 mphthis tornado
Light damage. Surface peeled off some roofs, gutters and siding damaged, branches broken, shallow-rooted trees pushed over.
F173 to 112 mph
Moderate damage. Roofs badly stripped, mobile homes overturned or badly damaged, exterior doors lost, windows broken.
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.
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.
F4207 to 260 mph
Devastating damage. Well-built houses leveled, structures with weak foundations moved some distance, cars thrown and large missiles generated.
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.
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.
The record
- Rating
- F0
- Date
- July 4, 2006
- Touchdown
- 4:30 PM EDT (20:30 UTC)
- Path length
- 1.5 miles (2.4 km)
- Path width
- 25 yards (23 m)
- Deaths
- 0
- Injuries
- 0
- Property damage
- $30,000
- County
- Portage County
- Touchdown point
- 41.020, -81.080
- Lift-off point
- 41.020, -81.070
- Record number
- 713
What the Weather Service recorded
During the late afternoon hours of July 4th, an F0 tornado touched down just west of Deerfield in Portage County. The path of the tornado was mainly through open fields, but a barn along the path sustained major structural damage. One wall of the barn was completely blown in, and about half of the roof was torn off. The barn had a slate roof, and many pieces of slate pierced the ground in the vicinity of the barn. Numerous other beams and boards from the barn were observed sticking from the ground. The tornado then continued through an open field before dissipating. No additional structural or crop damage was observed.
From NOAA NCEI's Storm Events Database, the narrative the local forecast office wrote for Storm Data.
What forecasters said that day
The local office's own words before the tornado touched down, as it sent them, from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of National Weather Service text.
NWS Cleveland, OH wrote its last area forecast discussion before the tornado touched down at Jul 4, 3:30 PM EDT, 1 hour earlier.
Area forecast discussion, Jul 4, 3:30 PM EDT, 1 hour before
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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.
Pittsburgh, PA (KPIT), 12:00Z
8.5 hours before the tornado, 107 km from the path. July 4, 2006.
- Mixed-layer CAPE
- 522 J/kg
- Mixed-layer CIN
- -47 J/kg
- Surface CAPE
- 242 J/kg
- Mixed-layer LCL
- 661 m above ground
- 0-6 km bulk shear
- 25 kt
- 0-1 km bulk shear
- 23 kt
- 0-1 km storm-relative helicity
- 76 m²/s²
- 0-3 km storm-relative helicity
- 87 m²/s²
- Significant tornado parameter
- 0.1
- Supercell composite
- 1.2
- 0-3 km lapse rate
- 5.0 K/km
Pittsburgh, PA (KPIT), 00:00Z
3.5 hours after it, 107 km from the path. July 5, 2006.
- Mixed-layer CAPE
- 531 J/kg
- Mixed-layer CIN
- -26 J/kg
- Surface CAPE
- 1198 J/kg
- Mixed-layer LCL
- 761 m above ground
- 0-6 km bulk shear
- 33 kt
- 0-1 km bulk shear
- 16 kt
- 0-1 km storm-relative helicity
- 83 m²/s²
- 0-3 km storm-relative helicity
- 86 m²/s²
- Significant tornado parameter
- 0.2
- Supercell composite
- 1.6
- 0-3 km lapse rate
- 5.3 K/km
The surface observations
Ravenna (29G), 26 km from the path, in the two hours either side.
| Time (UTC) | Temp (°F) | Dew point (°F) | Wind | Gust (kt) | Pressure (mb) | Weather |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC |
From the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of airport observations.
The radar
The Cleveland radar (KCLE), 79 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 20:31 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.
This ground now
The live radar over the trackEvery 2006 tornado in OhioEvery tornado in Ohio since 1950Warnings in force in Ohio nowThe forecast where you are
The other tornadoes of July 4, 2006
4 more were confirmed in the United States that day.
What this means
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.
Sources
NOAA Storm Prediction Center tornado database, 1950-2025, the official record kept by NOAA's Storm Prediction Center.