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Severe Weather 2025

buckeye05 said:
This is just simply asinine. It’s by all indications a slider house from the early 1900s. These types of homes have received F3 ratings dating all the way back to the pre-2000s “old school” F-scale era, and it’s absurd to claim that mid-range (F3/EF3) tornadoes can’t sweep away or level unanchored homes. I mean come on, Fujita himself rated leveled or swept away homes F3 sometimes (Decatur IL, Rainsville, IN, and others). Plus, I’ve seen wind tests done where industrial strength wind-makers for movie production were pointed at cheap nailed-down tract homes inside airplane hangars, and leveled them with mid-100s wind speeds, which irrefutably proves this can and DOES happen to frail/older homes. You’re literally just blowing hot air (no pun intended) because you see an empty foundation, which is straight up YouTube comments section depth of analysis, and are citing a “good ol’ days” hyper-liberal rating application style that never really existed to begin with, even when Dr. Fujita himself was alive.

The bottom line is, he rated sliders F3 on multiple occasions, and this was by all indications, a slider. That’s all there is to it, period, done, over and out, put to bed, mic drop, whatever you want to call it. Sheesh…
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You're asinine!

Nah, very fair points and good arguments. All my fair points and good arguments about this are in the EF thread. I guess my issue is more with the 150 mph wind speed estimate than the EF3 rating. Gotta remember, even though Fujita might've rated this F3, the range of wind speeds for an F3 were 158-206, which seems way more reasonable.

The flabbergasm I'm experiencing is with the classification not the rating. This can't be 150 mph winds.

IMG_2553.jpeg
 
AJS said:
I’m not tryna stir up any debates or controversial discussions, but tweets like this make me understand why Nick Kras had a lot of negative things to say about this forum.
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Eh, might sound harsh, but I don't think Nick has the experience to independently evaluate information and relies largely on repeating what other people have told him. One of the core contentions in EF debates is that the tools at hand are being used in a skewed or otherwise unreasonable way to rate tornadoes lower than might have otherwise been the case. That's not the kind of thing that can be solved by 'well I emailed Tim Marshall and he said this'.
 
Grand Poo Bah said:
You're asinine!

Nah, very fair points and good arguments. All my fair points and good arguments about this are in the EF thread. I guess my issue is more with the 150 mph wind speed estimate than the EF3 rating. Gotta remember, even though Fujita might've rated this F3, the range of wind speeds for an F3 were 158-206, which seems way more reasonable.

The flabbergasm I'm experiencing is with the classification not the rating. This can't be 150 mph winds.

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Yeah the wind speed estimates are part of the problem. I think, rule of thumb, if you add 20% to each category you’re maybe kind of close
 
@buckeye05 I will back off on my statements I made earlier about this thing potentially being EF5 for sure. I got caught up in the actual physical appearance of the tornado itself (I still think it had an EF4+ “look” physically) but I’m a little confused about what you said in the cycloidal markings image. That certainly looks more impressive than typical crop scouring to me, due to the excessive browning surrounding the beaten vegetation, with the cycloidal marks in the center of the browning. It also certainly looks like at least some of the trees are debarked in that first image (although I cannot tell, it’s too far up to see fully) and the ground immediately in the vicinity of the road that isn’t the crops, aka some of the grass, does actually look to be, at the very least, lightly scoured. To me that’s certainly much more impressive than the EF2 that hit the dominator, there’s barely any browning near the cyloidal marks in that instance. What am I not seeing here?

EDIT: I want to be clear as well, I never claimed that it would be unreasonable if this thing didn’t achieve an EF4+ rating, I just said I fully believed that if it achieved an EF3 rating it would be an underestimate whether it was a reasonable survey or not. Also, this is the image I’m referring to:
D4049A1C-4AAB-4677-BA39-57C403804B20.jpeg
 
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N0mz said:
Yeah the wind speed estimates are part of the problem. I think, rule of thumb, if you add 20% to each category you’re maybe kind of close
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Screenshot_2024-03-19_at_12.51.30_PM.png
while not at the 0-10 meter range , but instead from the 15 meter range , the range off how off it is gets worse the higher the rating it gets.

this is a wind speed measurement vs damage mage graph

one interesting thing to note is that the 166 mph is exactly where EF2 damage starts..

there are zero over rated tornadoes base on this (2 EF rating off, gray zone)

yet half of them are in the under rated zone (2 EF rating off , gray zone)

its to also note 2 EF0 had 166+ mph winds.

solid black outline seems to be where the real average damage made wind speed needed is at , while the dash line is what NWS states.
 
buckeye05 said:
N0mz is right. Will is pushing the “violent” narrative hard, and essentially basing it on an argument that consists of “I was there and it was like, totally crazy and stuff”. Ridiculous, yet people eat this stuff up. I hate 90% of WX influencers. There’s also the issue of amped up chasers making rating calls on social media when they probably couldn’t even tell you what a sill plate or CMU is if you asked them.

I WANT there to be well informed debate and pushback against unreasonable and flawed ratings of tornadoes, but it gets drowned out by a sea of passionately ignorant people doing more harm than good. Anyone who actually has good points to make and knows their stuff are unfortunately subject to guilt by association. Everything that has happened with the Gary tornado unfortunately only reinforces a likely pre-existing perception of “screeching, obnoxious, poorly-informed general public” from the perspective of the NWS. In this specific case, that’d be a fair assessment.
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Perhaps I’ve been “passionately ignorant” in recent days, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am going to push back against poor rating rulings or unreasonable observations. There’s always going to be a few steps in the wrong direction in terms of analysis when group-think and post-event adrenaline kicks in. I don’t exhaust all my efforts like some people do (not that there is any issue with that) but I do know that it is very easy to jump to conclusions without even realizing.
 
Tanner said:
Perhaps I’ve been “passionately ignorant” in recent days, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am going to push back against poor rating rulings or unreasonable observations. There’s always going to be a few steps in the wrong direction in terms of analysis when group-think and post-event adrenaline kicks in. I don’t exhaust all my efforts like some people do (not that there is any issue with that) but I do know that it is very easy to jump to conclusions without even realizing.
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Video evidence and witness testimony has been used in the past. I don't understand why it can't be used now. Like I said in the EF thread. A lot of the time these tornadoes leave behind very little evidence of their strength, so the fact almost all of the evidence we do have is tossed out most of the time is maddening.
 
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Grand Poo Bah said:
Video evidence and whiteness testimony has been used in the past. I don't understand why it can't be used now. Like I said in the EF thread. A lot of the time these tornadoes leave behind very little evidence of their strength, so the fact almost all of the evidence we do have is tossed out most of the time is maddening.
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And again, cars being thrown 300 yards?? 100% violent and not much will change my mind that unless it's upgraded, the survey was improper.
 
OH-IOan said:
And again, cars being thrown 300 yards?? 100% violent and not much will change my mind that unless it's upgraded, the survey was improper.
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They’re not going to upgrade the tornado based on a thrown car, Im not aware if this being this case at all since the Fujita scale was created.

You’d be surprised how far a car can be tossed/displaced just from straight line winds.
 
Everything I’m about to say has been pointed out by a few other members and honestly why I’ve kinda backed out because I’m not much on the in depth damage side of things in and I knew it was going to reach this point.And I will say this as it is and after reading this thread and a tweet from someone. Do better, you make us and the weather community who actually have some sense look bad. The way tornadoes are being rated now is the way it’s going to stay until this new rating system gets implemented.

Another thing I want to point out. The way that DI’s that are being rated and contextuals are being used is something we are going to have to get used to I hate to say that but that’s the current gnome of things. Jumping to conclusions because of what we have seen be SAID on WX is the last thing we should do. I will point out too the hallmark physical traits of this tornado definitely supported it being violent, I don't think there is any argument with that. I really haven’t seen much contextuals to up its rating either.

We had a tornado in Virginia back in 2018 that struck Elon and I looked at the damage when I was 12 and I actually gave it an EF3 rating before it was officially rated as such. The damage I’m seeing here is around the same as it was when that tornado hit Elon. It got a 150 mph rating, I predicted the rating and the wind speeds. Going with an EF4 seems like a good call. In all honesty, having as a 155MPH EF3 to me would be the perfect call for this tornado that seems to have so much controversy around it, but that’s just my two cents. You can take what I have to say with a grain of salt, however I think we all need to come to realization what we’re looking at and what we’re looking for when it comes to finding what a tornado should be rated this day and age.
 
jiharris0220 said:
They’re not going to upgrade the tornado based on a thrown car, Im not aware if this being this case at all since the Fujita scale was created.

You’d be surprised how far a car can be tossed/displaced just from straight line winds.
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The original F scale definitely included cars in the description of ratings. These description also very clearly show many of the tornadoes this year with F4 (and even F5) damage have been rated EF3. Many tornadoes with F3 damage have been rated EF2 and so on.

1751300951890.png

And this is an F5 DI list I threw together by scrolling F5 tornadoes on Wikipedia. Obviously take with a grain of salt, but cars were used to help justify F5 ratings in at least 18 separate instances.

1751301085028.png
 
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