KENTON, OH (WLIO) - After a recent tornado in Hardin County, our Nathan Kitchens spoke with one of the meteorologists that surveyed the damage to see how the National Weather Service comes up with their findings.
The tornado that struck the south side of Kenton on Saturday, August 12th, produced damage to several homes, uprooted trees, and even flattened a garage. Each time tornadoes occur, the National Weather Service is tasked with surveying the damage in order to reconstruct the tornado's life cycle and estimate the magnitude of the winds. On Saturday afternoon, a survey crew drove up from the office in Wilmington to conduct a survey.
"The first thing that we did when we got there was we went to the starting point. When did the damage actually begin, so we were driving out in the fields west of Kenton just to make sure that the touchdown didn't happen previous to the town of Kenton. When it comes to getting into the damage itself, you start to see the significance increase. As the tornado go stronger right there within the town, we saw some light metal debris, we saw some trees, but then eventually you saw some structure damage," explained Nate McGinnis, National Weather Service Wilmington Meteorologist.
Doppler radar detected significant rotation with this storm, prompting a tornado warning twenty minutes before it touched down. Upon arrival, crews were able to quickly determine this was an EF-1, with winds up to 90 mph.
"This was a pretty clear and evident signature in the damage itself that this was very isolated. If you went to the north side of town there was nothing at all with regards to damage. That can be very helpful because microbursts or straight-line wind damage most often times is not as localized as it was here," stated McGinnis.
Wind speeds are estimated by taking into account the extent of the damage, and type of construction. As you can imagine, an old barn compared to a home anchored to a foundation will have drastically different damage results at the same wind speed. The national weather service takes into account over two dozen damage indicators based on extensive research to come up with their results.
