It is still surreal what happened in Appomattox County a decade ago this week.
A sharply visible, classic dark cone tornado of EF-3 strength tore a path 17 miles long, damaging about 100 homes, killing one person and injuring seven others on Feb. 24, 2016.
This was February, mind you. Not spring or summer. Not hurricane remnants in September. There had been substantial snow and ice across our region just over a week earlier.
This week’s weather
This early week streaky snow on the distant backside of the mighty blizzard that buried the coast from Delaware to Massachusetts has passed. The rest of the week will be milder with some rain chances. Next week, there might be enough cold air dipping southward to at least put in a question mark as to whether wet systems could be a little wintry. The overall pattern, however, is expected to tilt warm for our region and much of the U.S. through mid-March.
It was the first tornado of EF-3 strength to ever hit Appomattox County since the beginning of reliable tornado data in 1950, and only the third tornado of any strength.
It was the first EF-3 tornado to affect the 40-county warning area of the National Weather Service office in Blacksburg, covering much of Southwest and Southside Virginia and extending into northwest North Carolina and southeast West Virginia, since Stoneville, N.C., was hit by one in March 1998.
Glade Spring in Washington County was hit by a deadly EF-3 in April 2011, but it’s under the umbrella of the National Weather Service office in Morristown, Tenn. Pulaski suffered a heavily damaging tornado earlier that same month, but it was rated as a strong EF-2 on the 0 (weakest, shingles lifted and windows broken) to 5 (strongest, well-constructed homes erased) Enhanced Fujita Scale.
Before Feb. 24, 2016, there had only been six tornadoes in February since 1950 in the Blacksburg office’s forecast area. That day had two, as Ararat in Patrick County also experienced an EF-1 tornado before Appomattox County was hit.
The Appomattox County tornado seemed to be the harbinger of a spate of tornadoes over our region’s Piedmont counties in the next few years.
EF-3 tornadoes would strike Lynchburg and southern Amherst County in 2018 and southern Franklin County in 2019. But those, odd as they were in intensity and as part of substantial outbreaks, hit in April, a more expected time for the infrequent tornadoes our region experiences.
Weather extremes in February 2016
February 2016 was a month of topsy-turvy contrasts for Southwest and Southside Virginia.
The month began with some areas along and west of the Blue Ridge still having lingering snow cover from a Jan. 22-23 winter storm that dumped 8-15 inches across our region, with even greater amounts of snow not far to our north with a classic nor’easter that tracked all the way from the southeast U.S. coast to off New England.
While mild early-February temperatures took care of that snow cover quickly, Arctic air re-established by mid-month, with much of the region seeing single-digit low temperatures by Valentine’s Day. This set up a double-barrel winter storm on Feb. 15-16.
The first round was a widespread snow of 4-10 inches, heaviest in and near the Roanoke and New River valleys. Milder air aloft moved in for the second round, which was mostly freezing rain changing to cold barely-above-freezing rain for many. There was tree damage and power outages, but the precipitation moved out just before it would have become a major ice storm.
The push of warmth aloft that turned single-digit lows and fluffy snow into icy slush in a couple days signaled a changing weather pattern that would set up the Feb. 24 tornado outbreak, as warm, moist air dominated the East for several days.
The early model-driven speculation about the Feb. 24 storm was that a strong low-pressure system might track far enough east to put western Virginia on its back side and bring about yet another winter storm. But as the event moved into the mid-range a few days out, it became more obvious it would track west and northwest of Virginia, putting the commonwealth in its “warm sector.”
That would mean rain and perhaps some thunderstorms. As the event moved from the mid-range to the short range, it became obvious that strong and shifting winds from the surface to aloft could give storm cells enough spin that tornadoes were at least a possibility.
It was still hard to get one’s mind around that something like what hit Appomattox County could occur.
Localized boundary fueled deadly tornado
One of the key ingredients for the Appomattox tornado was the boundary between a cold-air wedge banked against the mountains at the surface and warm, sticky air advancing northward.
While the Roanoke and New River valleys were stuck in the 40s much of the day during pouring rain on Feb. 24, some areas east and southeast of the Blue Ridge shot into the 60s.
Along the boundary between chill and warmth, horizontal atmospheric spin develops, which is ingested into storm updrafts and enhances the spin, increasing the risk of tornadoes.
That boundary intersected with a north-northeastward moving thunderstorm cell in Appomattox County. What was already a rotating thunderstorm cell that had been garnered multiple warnings for possible tornadoes gained an extreme and focused vortex of rotation that led to a deadly and destructive tornado.
El Niño was a culprit
Scanning out from the very local picture to globally, a strong El Niño was raging in the winter of 2016, influencing weather patterns worldwide.
El Niño refers to the irregularly recurring warming of equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures, noticed for centuries along the coast of Peru and called “the little boy” for the Christ child as it was often observed near Christmas. It’s cool-water opposite, La Niña, or “the little girl,” was discovered and named in the 20th century.
Across the southern and eastern U.S., El Niño tilted the 2015-16 winter to being warm and wet, with one of the warmest Christmas seasons on record. However, Arctic air pooled and pressed southward for the latter half of January and first half of February, resulting in the two winter storms our region experienced.
The retreating Arctic air interacting with the renewed advance of warm, moist air was a significant player on the large scale in the atmospheric setup that produced the Appomattox County tornado, as was the El Niño-driven tendency for strong storm systems to roll across the southern U.S.
Current projections are that the ongoing and weakening La Niña currently will give way to what may be a moderate to strong El Niño by next winter.
That in no way means that something like the Appomattox County tornado of 2016 is absolutely bound to happen again.
El Niño patterns do typically lean to the wet side, not necessarily a bad thing given ongoing drought. A weak to moderate El Niño combined with strong high pressure in the northern latitudes often leans to an abnormally snowy winter in our region. Even the strong El Niño of 2016 brought a couple of big snows.
We have a long time to see how the sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and the interlinking atmospheric patterns play out before next winter. But the alternation between warm and cold we are already experiencing as February rolls into March tells us rumbly storms and maybe some spinning ones are not far ahead in our regional weather future.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
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