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  • Current Tropical Systems
    Erin

Severe WX Severe Weather Threat 3/14-3/16

Aaron Rider said:
A tornado causing extremely impressive damage to the concrete slab but objectively not sweeping the slab clean somehow seems truly bizarre to me.

Can anyone think of any similar tornadoes in the past?
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Hackleburg. The tornado sucked up part of the Oh Bryan's restaurant foundation while not sweeping the slab clean:
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Does anyone have any insight on if they'll be surveying south/southwest of Greenwood, MS for early AM Sat for a tornado track? I see they have potential tracks to the W/NW of Greenwood, MS. Looking at RADAR between Hollandale and Belzoni from 12:06AM to 12:13AM (3/15) it seems like a pretty significant. Notably, it seems like even reflectivity picks up debris in the hook echo at 12:08AM as it crosses Goat Hill Rd. The debris signature in the hook appears again after the storm goes through Jaketown to the NW at 12:24 AM. The cell looks like it then cycled as it got to Sidon, MS.

ETA: I didn't see any tracks on the NWS Damage Toolkit. There do appear to be quite a few photos of a Tornado in Belzoni on Twitter, though from early Sat morning.
 
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ColdFront said:
That’s extremely interesting, Fred. I know with urban sprawl we would expect more opportunities for violent tornados vs the 20th and 19th centuries. But it does seem like the overall volume and occurrence of outbreaks with violent tornados, sans 4/27/11, over the past decade or has decreased. Can some of the variation be due to how conservative some aspects of the EF scale have gotten? That’s what I believe vs some sort of climatological signal that tornados are changing in character. I definitely don’t believe tornados are weaker. Interested to hear your thoughts.

The Alabama fact actually surprises me even more. That place has been a violent tornado magnet.
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Recent rating philosophy and how that is carried out may be part of it. That recent AMS paper on the EF5 situation certainly leans that direction. But this stuff also cycles. There are periods where it's a bit quieter. That's why that "return rate" for the 2/5/08, 5/4/03, etc., caliber outbreak over the long term average out to able once every 9-10 years but has come more frequent as 3 or less and has been as long as 13 even prior to this current stretch since 2011 where it's sitting at 14. The Alabama violent tornado activity also cycles in frequency over time too.
 
ColdFront said:
That’s extremely interesting, Fred. I know with urban sprawl we would expect more opportunities for violent tornados vs the 20th and 19th centuries. But it does seem like the overall volume and occurrence of outbreaks with violent tornados, sans 4/27/11, over the past decade or has decreased. Can some of the variation be due to how conservative some aspects of the EF scale have gotten? That’s what I believe vs some sort of climatological signal that tornados are changing in character. I definitely don’t believe tornados are weaker. Interested to hear your thoughts.

The Alabama fact actually surprises me even more. That place has been a violent tornado magnet.
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the problem is before 1999 they would try to give F5 rating to things that don't need it...
and after that they didn't give EF5 ratings to things that need it.

that is why there seems to be a EF5 Gap.

if we were to use the F scale era logic 190 MPH rated tornadoes would be EF5 rated.
 
joshoctober16 said:
this outbreak is now a Historic Outbreak with a OIS of 123, joining the rank with the 1965 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak (OIS 238) as both Historic outbreakView attachment 36683
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In my humble opinion, perhaps the March 31/April 1st, 2023 outbreak might be a better comparison regarding “Historic” class tornado outbreaks.
 
jiharris0220 said:
In my humble opinion, perhaps the March 31/April 1st, 2023 outbreak might be a better comparison regarding “Historic” class tornado outbreaks.
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Which is why I have such an axe to grind with Grazulis and his “OIS”. He just threw some kind of arbitrary metric listing together, that upon first glance looks okay. However, then you get into the intricacies of EF vs F scale, and somehow not having Palm Sunday as a “Super Outbreak” when half of the F4s that day could’ve easily have been a 5. The whole scale is just a bunch of data crammed together that really doesn’t say a whole lot
 
ColdFront said:
Which is why I have such an axe to grind with Grazulis and his “OIS”. He just threw some kind of arbitrary metric listing together, that upon first glance looks okay. However, then you get into the intricacies of EF vs F scale, and somehow not having Palm Sunday as a “Super Outbreak” when half of the F4s that day could’ve easily have been a 5. The whole scale is just a bunch of data crammed together that really doesn’t say a whole lot
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I also don’t like some of the classifications used here, as some words imply that an outbreak was bad solely on impacts and not objectively just it’s size; which it should be based on.

I personally would’ve swapped out the word “weak” with “minor” and replace the “minor” with “small”, finally, I’d replace “devastating” with substantial.

As devastating doesn’t make sense on here because even a “minor” outbreak can be devastating if it had a single Ef4/F4 go through a town.
1742312544676.png
 
joshoctober16 said:
this outbreak is now a Historic Outbreak with a OIS of 123, joining the rank with the 1965 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak (OIS 238) as both Historic outbreakView attachment 36683
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I was punching the numbers last night, and it ran out to 111 for the OIS. I had a feeling we would break into historic territory with so many tornadoes preliminary and unrated. Just an insane event. And it’s only the start of the spring season!
 
Kds86z said:
88 tornadoes and counting..
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An outbreak for the books my friend!
Grand Poo Bah said:
Cross posting from the ratings debate thread:

View attachment 36674

This is the Diaz slab in question. It will likely come under heavy scrutiny at the NWS because of the large tree located within the debris. Large debris is very commonly used to downgrade damage to structures during surveys. In the eyes of prominent storm surveyors, it is impossible to determine structures were destroyed by 205 MPH winds when it could've been debris impacts.

Surveyors normally don't use context like, for some examples, the severe ground scouring at the top of this pic (across the driveway); or the tipped over (potentially thrown) dump truck; or the 9 mangled cars that were launched like missiles (gathered top right); or the severe granulation of the house debris into tiny bits; or the sheared off, and bent anchor bolts..

In one tornado they even referenced a fence still standing nearby (like the one on the left in this photo) as evidence higher winds weren't actually present. There is no wind speed officially assigned to any of these contextual indicators, and there is no consensus of what wind speeds cause them. So they assign a lower bound wind speed. This home is a textbook EF3 rating under the current precedent.

View attachment 36675View attachment 36676

Here's where the snapped foundation is, and a closer view of it. Going to be pretty impossible to say what caused it. My fascinated inner child wants to know if it could've been the dump truck, but I know it was probably the bulldozer.

View attachment 36677

View attachment 36678View attachment 36679

These surveyors did an excellent job analyzing and documenting the damage, and using context to eliminate any doubt the tree may have caused. I'm confident this team could be the one to announce the next EF5. Either with this storm, or a future one. I believe, they will just need to be permitted to do so.
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The more I look at this DI, the more amazed I get. This tornado really did give the EF5 rating a run for its money. If that home had been swept a lot cleaner and granulated into smaller chunks, we would definitely have an EF5 rating.
 
ColdFront said:
Which is why I have such an axe to grind with Grazulis and his “OIS”. He just threw some kind of arbitrary metric listing together, that upon first glance looks okay. However, then you get into the intricacies of EF vs F scale, and somehow not having Palm Sunday as a “Super Outbreak” when half of the F4s that day could’ve easily have been a 5. The whole scale is just a bunch of data crammed together that really doesn’t say a whole lot
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I like the concept of the OIS, i.e. considering outbreaks by their intensity, but you have to account for chronological changes to how we rate and the fact that we've rated centuries-old tornadoes based on Uncle Jim's diary that said "my house done'd blewed away," which he did not do.
 
AJS said:
An outbreak for the books my friend!

The more I look at this DI, the more amazed I get. This tornado really did give the EF5 rating a run for its money. If that home had been swept a lot cleaner and granulated into smaller chunks, we would definitely have an EF5 rating.
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For sure @AJS . So thankful I was able to track it in real time from start to finish, notably Friday evening. 9 PDS at once I think. Was a bit of a waiting game as watches were issued fairly early and people questioned me when I said the threat was hours away but the watches said “evening” haha. Good times.
 
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