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Severe Weather 2025

Tornadoes like tonight's Nebraska monster highlight how incomplete, outdated and frankly, kinda dumb, the EF rating system is.

It made sense back the day, when we had very little advanced radar products, machine learning, and decades of science on improving tornado wind measurements in vivo.

But as shown above, we now have extremely advanced tools to basically remotely measure a tornado's strength and windspeed, regardless of the damage it causes, to a high level of accuracy.

Removing the EF rating system for something more modern and sophisticated could dramatically change the way we track, report and understand tornados and climate. Think about how much our understanding of tornadoes would change if we used radar velocity and 3d mapping, etc to measure tornado strength? We've been in an "EF5 drought" but that isn't necessarily because there are fewer EF5 tornadoes. It's a combination of a lack of EF5-strength tornadoes hitting the right type of buildings and the extremely subjective judgement of a few damage surveyors.

Let's say we knew, for example, that there were actually 30 EF-5 strength tornadoes in the last decade (the ones that didn't cause EF-5 damage). And that in the previous decade, there were 14 EF-5 strength tornadoes. Now we could start making actual progress towards understanding cumulative tornado activity over time, instead of relying on "damage surveys" to create arbitrary classifications.

It's time for a change.
 
lake.effect said:
Tornadoes like tonight's Nebraska monster highlight how incomplete, outdated and frankly, kinda dumb, the EF rating system is.

It made sense back the day, when we had very little advanced radar products, machine learning, and decades of science on improving tornado wind measurements in vivo.

But as shown above, we now have extremely advanced tools to basically remotely measure a tornado's strength and windspeed, regardless of the damage it causes, to a high level of accuracy.

Removing the EF rating system for something more modern and sophisticated could dramatically change the way we track, report and understand tornados and climate. Think about how much our understanding of tornadoes would change if we used radar velocity and 3d mapping, etc to measure tornado strength? We've been in an "EF5 drought" but that isn't necessarily because there are fewer EF5 tornadoes. It's a combination of a lack of EF5-strength tornadoes hitting the right type of buildings and the extremely subjective judgement of a few damage surveyors.

Let's say we knew, for example, that there were actually 30 EF-5 strength tornadoes in the last decade (the ones that didn't cause EF-5 damage). And that in the previous decade, there were 14 EF-5 strength tornadoes. Now we could start making actual progress towards understanding cumulative tornado activity over time, instead of relying on "damage surveys" to create arbitrary classifications.

It's time for a change.
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I don't disagree, but there is a better thread for this

talkweather.com

Enhanced Fujita Ratings Debate Thread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Fujita_scale Please be respectful and mature, obey forum rules but it was brought up in the damage report for this last severe wx event and I think we had a big discussion on TW before the forum crash. I'd like to see some examples of what you think were...
talkweather.com talkweather.com
 
Kds86z said:
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Did you see the helicity values and hodograph at the end of that animation? It got up to 700-1000 in the lowest 3-4 km. It’s just so rare for us to have surface based storms with that kind of vorticity. I also know at the beginning of its lifecycle that the storm was in the 3CAPE bullseye with values in excess of 175 j/kg.

I’m not surprised this thing was one of the longest lived and most intense supercells that we’ve witnessed in the past 25 years.
 
So looking back on this thread from last night, we may have had a very intense El Rino-like tornado last night. Wow. Just wow. 2025 has been producing strong tornado outbreaks and this nado last night.
 
Atlantic said:
So looking back on this thread from last night, we may have had a very intense El Rino-like tornado last night. Wow. Just wow. 2025 has been producing strong tornado outbreaks and this nado last night.
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Similar width and intensity too if those radar scans are accurate which is insane for a 5% tornado risk. I wouldn't be surprised if we had two (or more!) two mile wide tornadoes yesterday.
 
Maxis_s said:
Similar width and intensity too if those radar scans are accurate which is insane for a 5% tornado risk. I wouldn't be surprised if we had two (or more!) two mile wide tornadoes yesterday.
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It was just insane looking back on what happened over the weekend! What actually happened last night to be able to fuel such a powerful tornado and how?
 
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