EF4 Kansas Tornado Debris Found 50 Miles Away And That's Not Unusual

The EF4, up to a mile wide tornado, was on the ground for almost an hour, carving a 31-mile-long path through parts of Douglas and Leavenworth counties, a National Weather Service damage survey concluded.

There was no mistaking the tornado on radar. It stood out as a classic couplet in Doppler velocity data as it scraped the southeastern side of Lawrence, then Eudora and Linwood, Kansas.

Today, dual-polarization radar allows meteorologists to detect debris lofted by a tornado, appearing as a tornado debris signature, or TDS. This signature allows meteorologists to confirm a tornado is in progress by radar alone.

But what was remarkable about the Linwood tornado was that it apparently lofted debris up to 25,000 feet above the ground, according to one estimate.

(MORE: How Autumn Leaves Could Help Pinpoint Tornadoes on Radar)

Stronger tornadoes tend to loft debris higher, according to a number of recent studies. Lighter debris, transported by strong winds around the parent thunderstorm, then falls out of the sky dozens of miles away, even after the tornado has dissipated.

Initially, one resident near Tonganoxie, Kansas, about 7 miles north-northwest of Linwood, reported pieces of insulation on his porch.

In a rather surreal sequence of events, the still tornado-warned storm prompted an evacuation of Kansas City International Airport. Passengers and staff moved to parking tunnels for safety.

While the tornado had dissipated prior to the storm's arrival at the airport, a collection of flower pots, plant ID tags, foam and wall panels rained down, prompting a shutdown of the airfield to clean up the numerous pieces of debris over what the airport said were "millions of square feet".

Some of this lofted debris was from the destroyed Free State Growers nursery near Linwood. Plant containers were found at National Golf Club near the airport, and in Smithville, Missouri, northeast of Kansas City.

Radar continued to show the lofted debris over a rather expansive area south of St. Joseph and north of Kansas City.

Others noted leaves, insulation and scraps of aluminum falling into their yards in Trimble, Missouri, just north of Smithville.

Parts of Platte, Clay and Clinton counties in northwestern Missouri also reported debris fallout from the Kansas tornado.

Other Recent Cases

In April 2015, another long-track EF4 tornado in Fairdale, Illinois, blew a sign from a destroyed restaurant almost 50 miles away.

It also blew a check from near Rochelle, Illinois, to Racine, Wisconsin, about 80 miles away.

A Facebook page helped reunite photos and other personal items with their owners.

A study led by John Knox of the University of Georgia pored through hundreds of pictures of debris from the April 27, 2011, tornado outbreak that were posted on another Facebook page, which has since taken down, to map start and end points of individual pieces of debris.

Knox's team found a photograph from Phil Campbell, Alabama, which was leveled by an EF5 tornado, turned up in Lenoir City, Tennessee, some 220 miles away.

A total of 44 items were found to have traveled at least 135 miles from their source on April 27, 2011, according to Knox. Not surprisingly, the majority of lofted debris found was from EF4 or EF5 tornadoes that struck that day.

A windbreaker from Hackleburg, Alabama, was found in Elkmont, Alabama, about 68 miles away.

"Tornadoes have been reported to carry an object at least as heavy as 83 tons, as in the case of a railroad car," said Dr. Greg Forbes, severe weather expert at The Weather Channel. A mattress was once blown 40 miles from Worcester, Massachusetts, into Massachusetts Bay on June 9, 1953.

A man was blown roughly one-quarter mile by a tornado in Fordland, Missouri, on March 12, 2006. Knocked unconscious, he landed in a grass field and is thought to be the farthest blown human being from a tornado that lived to tell about it, according to Forbes.