EF0 tornado, Port Lavaca, Texas, September 29, 2012

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

September 29, 2012

Touchdown

5:11 PM CDT (22:11 UTC)

Lifted

5:12 PM CDT (22:12 UTC)

On the ground

1 minutes

Path length

0.1 miles (0.2 km)

Path width

30 yards (27 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

Property damage

$100,000

County

Calhoun County

Touchdown point

28.618, -96.642

Lift-off point

28.619, -96.641

Record number

1209291611-01

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

• Gutter peeled off back side of business. Air conditioning unit on roof flipped over.

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

Tropical moisture was situated over South Texas on the morning of September 28th, 2012. Additional moisture from the remnants of Hurricane Miriam in the Eastern Pacific was moving into the mountains of Mexico and streaming into South Texas. A stationary front was situated over Central Texas, as an upper level disturbance was approaching from the west. The combination of very high moisture, forcing along the stationary front, the upper disturbance and upslope flow over the mountains of Mexico was an ideal set up for heavy rainfall to occur over South Texas during the late evening of September 28th through the early evening of September 29th.||Showers and thunderstorms began to develop and organize over the mountains of Mexico and the frontal boundary late Friday evening. The storms moved into the Laredo area about an hour before midnight on the 28th, producing very heavy rainfall and widespread flooding in the city. Flooding was first reported in the city of Laredo around midnight September 29th, with some locations receiving nearly 6 inches of rain in just a couple of hours. The complex of storms continued to move east, producing wind damage in portions of Live Oak County and heavy rainfall elsewhere. The system weakened as it approached the coast. The storms then moved east on the 29th, allowing the atmosphere time to recover for the afternoon round of convection.||By mid-afternoon on the 29th, the frontal boundary approached South Texas. Skies had sufficiently cleared behind the morning storms to allow the atmosphere to destabilize. This led to another round of thunderstorms producing heavy rainfall, mainly over the eastern half of South Texas. Surface winds shifted more to the east as the boundary approached the coastal areas, helping to produce an EF-0 tornado near Port Lavaca and a waterspout east of Port Aransas late Saturday afternoon on the 29th.

An NWS storm survey concluded an EF-0 tornado briefly touched down just west of Highway 35 at Farm to Market Road 3084. A Tractor Supply store experienced minor damage which included losing gutters off the building and a rooftop air conditioning unit being flipped. Winds were estimated at 65 mph.

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

19 minutes of warning. NWS CRP issued a tornado warning for this county at 21:52 UTC, 19 minutes before the tornado touched down, in force until 22:30 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 General Thunderstorms Risk, with a 0.02 chance of a tornado within 25 miles. The outlook in force was issued at 19:48 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.

Port_lavaca (PKV), 5 km from the path, in the two hours either side.

From the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of airport observations.

The Corpus Christi radar (KCRP), 126 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 22:09 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 2012 tornado in TexasEvery tornado in Texas since 1950Warnings in force in Texas nowThe forecast where you are

1 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.