March 28th and 29th Tornado Outbreak

The following pages will provide an overview of the tornadic and otherwise severe wheather events that took place across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles from Wednesday afternoon, March 28th through Thursday morning, March 29th 2007.

FINAL STORM DAMAGE AND EF RATING ASSESMENT IS NOW COMPLETE!!! PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT CONCERNING THIS EVENT.

In total, there were 15 tornadoes!

3 - EF 3

4 - EF 2

2 - EF 1

6 - EF 0

This was the largest tornado outbreak in history for the month of March.

All updates to these pages will be listed in RED - Current updates are from April 11th, 2007.

NOTE: Video evidence of additional tornadoes continues to be assessed and an official update will be forthcoming. At this time no additional significant tornado damage is known to have occurred.

A very dynamic weather pattern in place brought severe weather, including some large   tornadoes, to the central United States starting during the afternoon on Wednesday, March   28th through the early morning hours on Thursday, March 29th. Severe weather reports associated with this pattern extended from Southwestern Texas into the Dakotas.

As of 4:00pm on Thursday, March 29th there were 66 tornado reports, 144 hail reports, and 15 wind reports associated with this system. Note that these are simply received reports and DO NOT indicate 66 different tornadoes. Likewise some of the hail reports were reported by individuals in nearly identical positions. Nonetheless, the current number of confirmed tornadoes is around 41 from the Southern Texas Panhandle up into Northwestern Nebraska. Storm damage surveys are still being conducted, but preliminary estimates place a few of these tornadoes in the EF 3 range. In addition to the tornadoes, there were numerous reports of golf ball to baseball sized hail with one report of softball sized hail near the Pantex plant a few miles outside of Amarillo, TX. Strait line winds (not associated with a tornado) also blew with many of the storms producing multiple wind gusts above 60 mph, with a few measurements above 80 mph!

In addition to the tornadoes, hail and winds, many communities were faced with flash flooding as these storms moved over the same areas time after time. This caused flooding in Donley, Gray and Lipscomb counties where water invaded some homes.

So what caused this widespread severe weather event? The following pages will discuss the large scale synoptic pattern in place and also the small scale environment that helped trigger the tornadoes.

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If you are just interested in the radar imagery, storm photo's, or storm damage photo's you can click here and jump to that page. (New pictures, and storm rating information updated 4/11/07)