Heber-Overgaard tornado confirmed as higher-end EF-1, NWS says

Weather Service in Flagstaff confirmed that this was a tornado, and we're joined by Megan Taylor from the National Weather Service in Flagstaff tonight to tell us more about it. Hi, Megan. Thanks for joining us. Tell us how your organization makes a determination like this and what all goes into it. Yeah, absolutely. So we travel on site after the tornado has occurred. We travel to the location. We send a team of us to assess the damage, and we work with all the local emergency officials and the team there we assess the severity and the extent of the damage we have some damage indicators that we use that help us try to determine what the estimated wind speeds were and we we put all that together into our mapping software and come up with what we think is the best estimate of the maximum wind speeds and so this one came out to be rated a higher end EF1 tornado. Megan, how do you tell the difference between straight light winds and winds from a twister? That's a great question. So this particular storm had a lot of damage to trees and vegetation. We saw a lot of snapped ponderosa pine trees. That's often indicative of tornadic damage. We see tree fall in different directions. Usually with straight line wind damage, you see a lot of the trees falling in the same direction in this case we had tree fall in many different directions sometimes on top of each other in addition to that we saw a lot of debris and material kind of lofted around we even saw a pine a branch of a pine tree kind of pushed in through a house into the interior of the home so things like that as you can see in this photo here a lot of material lofted into the trees, very indicative of tornadic damage. Megan, last thing. There were some reports from people who live there that they thought the tornado warning came out after the tornado touched down. What can you tell us about that? Yeah, absolutely. So we had a severe thunderstorm warning out as the storm was approaching the town of Heber Overgard. That particular warning mentioned the possibility of a tornado. And we're always watching radar. We're watching weather information. We're using, you know, a lot of different information to make the warning decisions. When we saw that storm strengthen heading toward the town, we issued the tornado warning. That's right when it hit town. So a lot of folks were experiencing the storm kind of very close to the time that they were receiving the warning. And the tornado did progress through the town northward, almost right up to Highway 277, and then dissipated after that. All right, fair enough. Megan Taylor from the National Weather Service in Flagstaff, thank you for your time tonight.