A tornado touches down in a field west of McCook on Friday. The system continued north through the evening with a confirmed touchdown near Moorefield in northern Frontier County, and again near Cozad in Dawson County.
A lone super cell (click here) soaked up all the atmosphere’s energy Friday and unleashed a four-hour, 120-mile long string of tornadoes that caused damage to rural homes but mostly missed populated areas in central Nebraska.
“It looks like it dropped about a dozen tornadoes,” said Cliff Cole, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in North Platte. Cole described it as one of the longer tornadic events in central Nebraska in recent memory.
Three separate weather service offices — North Platte, Hastings and Goodland, Kansas — investigated the tornadoes Saturday, determining that most were EF1 on the F Scale — a rating system from 0 to 5 based on the amount of damage caused.
The strongest tornado appeared to be a EF3 that touched down northwest of Stockville in rural Frontier County about 55 miles southeast of North Platte, which caused significant damage to a rural home, he said....
