Ask the Meteorologist: How far can tornadoes travel?

The National Weather Service offices in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Paducah, Kentucky, concluded that a tornado in mid-March traveled nearly 118 miles.

In Missouri alone, this outbreak caused more than a dozen tornadoes.

In Arkansas, it produced 15 tornadoes.

This tornado’s path was extremely long, but the record for longest tornado in Arkansas was back in 2008. It traveled almost 122 miles.

That’s according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.

Why did it take a month to get the results?

These things take time, especially when you’re talking about long-track, violent tornadoes like this one. Additional satellite and ground analysis had to be done in order to get the most accurate results.

At its strongest, the twister produced EF-4 damage. A weather sensor in Arkansas measured a wind gust of 151 mph in the storm’s path.

What would a 117 mile-long tornado look like here?

A path of 117 miles would take a tornado from Raeford to Rocky Mount.

For perspective, the EF-3 that traveled from Sanford to Raleigh on April 16, 2011 went nearly 65 miles.

(We’ll have a separate story to mark 14 years since that outbreak on Wednesday.)

What is the longest tornado on record in the U.S. and North Carolina?

NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center says, “Most tornadoes last less than 10 minutes. The average distance tornadoes have traveled (based on path length data since 1950) is about 3.5 miles.”

It’s difficult to determine the longest tornado on record, since there are obvious technology limitations during the early days of weather observation in the U.S.

However, most reports will point you to the Tri-State tornado outbreak of 1925. This is when a tornado reportedly traveled 219 miles, moving through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

The longest tornado on record in North Carolina was in 1992, and its path length was 160 miles. It traveled from Harnett County to Elizabeth City.

This is according to a report done by the NBC-affiliate in Charlotte.

What causes tornadoes to stop?

I was recently messaged on Facebook, asking what it takes for tornadoes to stop.

Here was my response:

“It can be a number of things. Either cold air becomes more dominant, it moves into more stable air or the amount of spin in the atmosphere drops off. Just depends on the situation.”

The death of a tornado is still something that’s being studied in universities and by storm chasers, but the most common thing you’ll see in the field is the cold (stable) outflow of a storm becoming more dominant.

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Have questions about the weather and how it works?

Send me an email with the subject line ‘Ask the Meteorologist:’ to cmichaels@wral.com.