San Antonio tornado ruled EF-0, National Weather Service

SAN ANTONIO (KTSA News) — Thursday’s EF-0 tornado came as a bit of a surprise to the meteorologists at the National Weather Service (NWS).

This did not stop an employee at KSAT-12 from capturing video of the funnel cloud during the morning commute.

“We were not expecting severe weather,” said Paul Yura with NWS.  “Yes we had some thunderstorms, but nothing that we would deem like severe.”

The twister touched down around 8 a.m. in the area of Fairchild Park, across of the cemeteries.  Yura says the tornado hopped around as it moved across I-35 and went through Fort Sam Houston doing minor damage there and continuing north all the way to Austin Highway.

It was a small tornado, and NWS meteorologists later determined it had a rating of EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

“We estimated winds of 80 miles per hour.  “That makes it an EF-0,” Yura explains.  “It was one of the weakest we have, but the path was like five miles.  It wasn’t on the ground the whole time, it wasn’t a continual path of damage.”

It turns out tornadoes at this time of year are possible, although rare.

“It can happen at any time, like when we had our big Halloween Floods of 2015 where several tornadoes occurred while we were dealing with flash flooding.”  Yura says anytime there is unstable weather it could spin up a tornado:  “When you have an atmosphere with rain showers and thunderstorms, technically it’s plausible we could get a tornado.”

NWS San Antonio tornado damage path (October 27, 2023)