New Jersey was hit by a rare February tornado, with winds to 115 mph. Lack of snow may have been a factor.
This was the first February tornado to hit New Jersey in 24 years.
As if this winter hasn’t been surreal enough, a powerful tornado with winds up to 115 mph touched down in Mercer County on Tuesday, the first February confirmed tornado in the Garden State since 1999, the National Weather Service said.
“There’s a lot of damage,” said Lee Robertson, a meteorologist with the weather service in Mount Holly. A survey crew reported sporadic and considerable structure damage along a path from Lawrence Township, about 5 miles north of Trenton, to West Windsor Township.
No deaths or injuries were reported.
The twister touched down at 3:30 p.m. and held together along an east-northeast path for an unusually long 5.8 miles, as opposed to the typical one to two miles, the weather service said. It was rated an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale.
This marked the fifth February tornado in New Jersey since 1950, said Matthew Elliott, warning coordination meteorologist for the government’s Storm Prediction Center. Three of those occurred on a single day.
Wintertime thunderstorms, let alone the tornadoes they spawn, are unusual around here because the atmosphere typically doesn’t become volatile enough until the weather gets warmer.
However, the general lack of snow cover has made conditions more favorable for early-season tornadoes, said Elliott. “If you don’t have as much snowpack, it’s going to be a lot easier to get that warm, moist air farther north,” he said.
Much of the East has been snow-starved this winter, with all of 0.3 inches officially measured in Philadelphia. It happened that a mere 0.7 inches of snow was measured in Philadelphia in February 1999, the year a tornado struck Cherry Hill, Camden County. In February 1973, the only snowless winter in Philly, three touched down in one day on Feb. 2, including one with peak winds similar to the one in Mercer County on Tuesday.
This twister was set off by a potent front that arrived on a day when temperature readings had soared into the 60s.
Elliott said that what made it so unusual was the fact that the atmosphere wasn’t all that moist on Tuesday. “Everything had to come perfectly together,” he said, adding that it was the product of “very, very small-scale processes.”
The idiosyncratic nature of tornadoes has made them an elusive climate-change subject, said Elliott, and how the warming of the planet might be affecting tornado incidence and intensity remains an important area of research.
No tornado threats are in the Philly area’s immediate future, forecasters say, nor is normality.
» READ MORE: Tornadoes are unusual in Jersey in any season
Temperatures Wednesday afternoon, in the 40s, with sleet reported in some areas, were 10 degrees lower than Tuesday’s and 15 to 20 degrees below Monday’s. They are expected to head toward 70 degrees Thursday.
Said Robertson, “Pretty crazy.”