A rare midwinter tornado uprooted trees and destroyed a carport in northern Amelia County on the evening of Friday, Jan. 12, but no one was injured.
Though it was only in existence for about 2 minutes, it will go down as the first tornado to strike anywhere in the United States in 2018.
On average, 1,300 tornadoes of varying size and strength will track across the country in a given year, with about 19 of them in Virginia.
It’s unlucky that one should hit any central Virginia backyard, and it’s particularly unusual that this one blew through in the dead of winter, five days after record cold and five days before another blanket of snow covered the region.
On Tuesday, a survey team from the National Weather Service in Wakefield confirmed that the damage along a 0.4-mile path in Amelia was evidence of 95 mph winds, making it an EF-1 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.
The tornado hit just north of Genito Road, 7 miles north of Amelia Courthouse, or 8 miles southwest of the town of Powhatan. It swirled up within a line of severe thunderstorms that swept across the Piedmont on that unseasonably balmy evening.
The storms downed trees, limbs and power lines in at least a dozen other spots between Boydton and Richmond, but there’s no evidence that those reports were the work of any other tornadoes, according to the NWS.
The part of the storm responsible for the tornado traveled northeast from Prince Edward County at 40 mph, and at 9:48 p.m., showed enough threatening rotation to prompt their meteorologists to issue a tornado warning for Amelia, Powhatan, and parts of Goochland and Chesterfield County.
That tornado warning had been out for 14 minutes before the tornado struck around 10:02 p.m.
Doppler radar also revealed rotating winds within storms over Nottoway and Dinwiddie County, which led to two other tornado warnings that evening.
That day’s unusual warmth fueled the storms with unstable air, but their severity was due to shearing wind in the lower atmosphere.
Severe weather isn’t common here during the cold season, but that combination of strong shear with above-average warmth is usually to blame for any damaging storms at this time of year.
January is tied with November as the second-lowest month for tornado activity in Virginia — only December has fewer instances.
In records going back to 1950 there have been 17 January tornadoes in Virginia, occurring in only nine years: 1962, 1975, 1978, 1996, 1999, 2005, 2006, 2014 and 2018.
Most of those January tornadoes occurred in the eastern half of the state, and most were on the low end of the intensity scale.
The most violent January tornado in Virginia — and the only one responsible for a fatality — destroyed a number of homes at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Stafford County early on the morning of Jan. 26, 1978.
The intense low pressure system that spawned that deadly tornado also hit the Richmond area with destructive 58 mph gusts, and made national headlines for causing a crippling blizzard in the Ohio Valley.
The Gulf Coast states between Texas and Florida are most prone to severe storms during the winter, because they are closest to the warm and humid air of the Gulf of Mexico.
Damaging storms can strike Virginia at any time of year, as long as the necessary amount of warmth, humidity and wind shear are present.
Until last Friday, the most recent tornado in Virginia was early on the morning of Oct. 24, 2017, in King William County.
Amelia County was last hit by a tornado on June 10, 2013, when a weak, brief twister was observed by a local storm chaser in a rural area southwest of Jetersville.
by John Boyer, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Jan 18, 2018
