I’m noticing some common threads here in the sentiments among a lot of these younger, overly dismissive, newer, and not particularly knowledgeable tornado intensity enthusiasts. I suspect there is a group chat or community outside of TalkWeather in which this “defaulting to skepticism and nit picking/dismissing everything” is currently “in” and being falsely equated to having higher knowledge in the field of tornado intensity and damage surveying. That mindset is likely being rewarded and reinforced by others who make people who engage in that kind of approach feel like they’re “on the right track” and are learning the “right way” to look at tornado damage and intensity estimation, unlike those crazy people over at TalkWeather who just overhype and call everything an EF5 candidate.
This is coming from someone who already went through that phase of essentially cosplaying as mister super conservative, nit picking, smarty pants damage surveyor who’s level headed skepticism allowed me to rise above all the “hype” and “exaggeration”. That was me when I was younger, and I truly thought I had it all figured out, but I can tell you based on experience that defaulting to skepticism and relentless nit picking brings you no closer to having a better understanding of the relationship between tornado intensity and damage. But I get it, everyone wants to distance themselves from the “omgg there’s a muddy spot and a bare slab in that one pic! this was an f5!” that we all once were when we were first getting into this. I went through that phase too when I was much younger, and I also went through the aforementioned phase afterwards where I overcorrected and became too skeptical and conservative as I got older. I think we’re seeing a lot of people collectively in that overcorrection phase as they get older too. I’m 31 now, and I now know that when it comes to the topic of tornado damage and intensity estimation, having a good grasp on things doesn’t come down to being skeptical OR being bullish. It comes down to being observant, objective, and putting more stock into what actually happens in real life tornado events of various intensities, instead of putting stock into what you’ve heard other people say is or isn’t significant.
The best things you can do to have a good grasp on tornado damage and intensity is to observe all available damage info from various tornado events in great detail, take notes, build a mental catalog of tornado events and the damage they caused, look at both the structural and contextual damage, compare the two, recognize patterns, recognize inconsistencies, and overall just study the aftermath of historic tornado events like case law. If you do that over the course of multiple years, combined with poring over official studies and presentations from EF scale experts like Jim LaDue, you’ll truly get a good feel for things.
But going down the “grass scouring is meaningless” and “it doesn’t really matter that a truck was found two miles from its point of origin” route will do nothing but cloud your judgement and make you blind to what’s important in the realm of intensity estimation.
This is grazulis’ listing for the jud tornado. This thing was 500 yards wide and killed 17 people over an 18 mile path.
texashistory.unt.edu
