Significant Tornado Events

[eric11]

I've been trying to find more photographs from this family, I'd love to see more photographs of Trousdale and Hopewell. Also, is there a chance there might be a photograph of Greensburg and Trousdale on the ground simultaneously?

Just based on the radar data, I believe yes

 

[pohnpei]

I've been trying to find more photographs from this family, I'd love to see more photographs of Trousdale and Hopewell. Also, is there a chance there might be a photograph of Greensburg and Trousdale on the ground simultaneously?

This image may be the time when two or potential three wedge tornados on the ground simultaneously.

 

[eric11]

Twins and their interactions fascinates me for all time.Besides the Big Four and Pilger twins,here's two more interesting event.
This twins near Pampa TX on 11/16/2015 were both produced by a cyclic supercell.Left one may be the occluding Pampa EF3, right one should by Miami EF3 that later turned into a mile-wide wedge.

No photos but only words description, I found the comment under an article of Pilger.I think this event may be the Stuart IA F4 on 5/27/1995.There does exist some short clip shows two tornadoes developing in tornado classic videos but nothing like"Two wedge side by side".I'm always waiting for this user to release his video but seem he's already forgotten this

@andyhb once mentioned big twins on 5/10/1985 and 3/28/2007 both in CO.Would love to find out whether there're any pics.

 

[speedbump305]

This image may be the time when two or potential three wedge tornados on the ground simultaneously.View attachment 6734

Good lord those Radar signatures... this reminds me. i have an image of the Pilger EF4s i think somewhere. the velocities were pretty high if i remember.

 

[pohnpei]

Twins and their interactions fascinates me for all time.Besides the Big Four and Pilger twins,here's two more interesting event.
This twins near Pampa TX on 11/16/2015 were both produced by a cyclic supercell.Left one may be the occluding Pampa EF3, right one should by Miami EF3 that later turned into a mile-wide wedge.
View attachment 6733
No photos but only words description, I found the comment under an article of Pilger.I think this event may be the Stuart IA F4 on 5/27/1995.There does exist some short clip shows two tornadoes developing in tornado classic videos but nothing like"Two wedge side by side".I'm always waiting for this user to release his video but seem he's already forgotten this
View attachment 6735
@andyhb once mentioned big twins on 5/10/1985 and 3/28/2007 both in CO.Would love to find out whether there're any pics.

1995/5/27 event was also quite mysterious to me.Three violent tornados occurred on that day according to NCDC database. The time of them were pretty close so there was a possibility that a double tornado event did happen. Only little damage information can I find about these violent tornados.

Storm Events Database - Search Results | National Centers for Environmental Information

www.ncdc.noaa.gov

 

[buckeye05]

I remember the Stuart, IA footage from when I was a kid! It ends with one of the tornadoes passing very close to the cameraman’s house, sending a screen door flying open right before the video cuts off.

Speaking of 11/16/2015, that is one of my favorite “second season” events for sure. Minimal damage and no loss of life, but a very intense and highly unusual outbreak.

 

[Equus]

Speaking of, at least last I checked, TVC 1-3 were actually up on YouTube in their entirety; which is good because I never managed to get them on DVD, just VHS haha

 

[pohnpei]

I remember the Stuart, IA footage from when I was a kid! It ends with one of the tornadoes passing very close to the cameraman’s house, sending a screen door flying open right before the video cuts off.

Speaking of 11/16/2015, that is one of my favorite “second season” events for sure. Minimal damage and no loss of life, but a very intense and highly unusual outbreak.

Some interesting damages of Pampa tornado 2015/11/16 was mentioned on tornado summit 2016

https://tornadosummit.org/archive/2016/files/Presentations/BO5_TornadosHereandAbroad_Womble.pdf

There are also other interesting stuff in this document. It seems that they really consider many new findings and observations into the design of new EF scale.

 

[buckeye05]

I still have questions about whether TianJin tornado 1969/8/29 was an EF5 tornado, let alone the strongest of all time. Speaking of the factory damage, no one know whether it had sufficient vertical steel to support the lateral wall or whether any other weak point of the building exist. That "mangled car" in ZhuHe village was just normal cart rather than mangled vehicle, something very common in rural area in this place. There was no such "vehicle thing" in such rural area in North China Plain in 1969. People live in poor life at this time and no way they can afford an vehicle. EF scale rating here was quite liberal yet still got EF4 rating rather than EF5. The tornado was likely stronger before entering TinJin. You may have no idea what a true night time EF5 tornado can do to the fourth largest city in China at that time.

These are all good points. I probably jumped the gun a bit by adding to my top 20. Eating a bit of crow here, but this shows just how much information is needed to even begin to accurately ascertain tornado intensity based on text and photos, especially older events. That’s why there can’t be any leaps in logic, and why a lot of these “most intense” lists are an excessive in futility.

 

[buckeye05]

Some interesting damages of Pampa tornado 2015/11/16 was mentioned on tornado summit 2016

https://tornadosummit.org/archive/2016/files/Presentations/BO5_TornadosHereandAbroad_Womble.pdf

There are also other interesting stuff in this document. It seems that they really consider many new findings and observations into the design of new EF scale.

View attachment 6736

Can’t wait to dive into this once I get home from work. I do remember that one of the EF3 damage points produced by one of the Pampa twins, was based on a truck being lifted and carried over the top of a barn.

It’s unusual to see vehicle-based damage points in contemporary damage surveying and idk how much I trust it.

 

[pohnpei]

Can’t wait to dive into this once I get home from work. I do remember that one of the EF3 damage points produced by one of the Pampa twins, was based on a truck being lifted and carried over the top of a barn.

It’s unusual to see vehicle-based damage points in contemporary damage surveying and idk how much I trust it.

I remember that the highest rating point of Kismet Ks EF3 tornado that day was oil tank being tossed for some distance, also unusual staff.
Speaking of vehicle-based damage point, some very interesting damage from this document can be found:

EF2 vehicle damage with barely EF0 structure damage. How to rate this? It reminds me of Jonesboro debate last year. This tornado did several incredible vehicle damages yet no violent structure damage anywhere inside the city. Weird thing! For the damage on this picture, I do believe EF2 winds occurred, however, for some reason the structure didn't response to the wind. It just show how complicated and intricate the damage rating can be.

 

[TH2002]

Has there been much discussion in this thread about the June 20, 1957 Fargo tornado? I know that Fujita extensively studied this tornado and retrospetively gave it an F5 rating. (based on damage in Golden Ridge IIRC?) However I've read that many of the homes that were swept away in that area were rather poorly constructed. Is this another case where the tornado wouldn't receive an EF5 rating today?

 

[buckeye05]

I remember that the highest rating point of Kismet Ks EF3 tornado that day was oil tank being tossed for some distance, also unusual staff.
Speaking of vehicle-based damage point, some very interesting damage from this document can be found:
View attachment 6737
EF2 vehicle damage with barely EF0 structure damage. How to rate this? It reminds me of Jonesboro debate last year. This tornado did several incredible vehicle damages yet no violent structure damage anywhere inside the city. Weird thing! For the damage on this picture, I do believe EF2 winds occurred, however, for some reason the structure didn't response to the wind. It just show how complicated and intricate the damage rating can be.

Kismet did also produce debarking and genuine EF3 damage to a metal frame building, so it wasn’t entirely based on the oil tank, but it was considered one of the main factors.

Also yeah, the Cape Coral, FL EF2 is an interesting case. All the houses there have extremely stringent building codes, so no roofs came of in typical EF2 fashion. They ended up basing the rating on car and power pole damage.

 

[buckeye05]

Has there been much discussion in this thread about the June 20, 1957 Fargo tornado? I know that Fujita extensively studied this tornado and retrospetively gave it an F5 rating. (based on damage in Golden Ridge IIRC?) However I've read that many of the homes that were swept away in that area were rather poorly constructed. Is this another case where the tornado wouldn't receive an EF5 rating today?

I have several ground photos of the Golden Ridge Subdivision, but they just show a bunch of leveled and swept away block foundation homes. Nothing particularly impressive.

 

[Casuarina Head]

That's also been attributed to Fujita RE: Guin, Xenia and others. He died in 1998 and I doubt he did much direct analysis of Jarrell.

Honestly, I think most or all of those reports are just rumours—false ones, no less. There are very few, if any, direct citations in which Dr. Fujita explicitly laid claims to a particular event being “so-and-so” intense. Even his conversations with Thomas P. Grazulis on this point are ambiguous at best and cannot be used as “proof,” much less inference. No one can really identify the “most intense” tornadoes of all time with any degree of certainty or knowledge, given that reliable records only go back a few decades at most. Probably many tornadoes have been even more intense than Smithville or Jarrell but were relatively undocumented or failed to impact representative DIs. As I know now most DIs really shouldn’t be used as DIs to determine extremely intense events, given that much weaker tornadoes can cause comparable damage to corn, vehicles, some soils, steel-and-concrete rebar, and so on. We can only conclude that Smithville and Jarrell are the most intense known within our comparatively brief timescale of record.

 

[speedbump305]

So while i was reading some articles about F5 tornadoes, i came across this and apparently this is an image of the Ivanovo tornado. if this is in fact the tornado, this shows us that it wasn’t a huge wedge and was probably under one mile wide.

 

[Marshal79344]

So while i was reading some articles about F5 tornadoes, i came across this and apparently this is an image of the Ivanovo tornado. if this is in fact the tornado, this shows us that it wasn’t a huge wedge and was probably under one mile wide.

It's hard to tell the true width of that tornado due to the fact that we don't know the base height, and that the tornadic circulation is always bigger than the actual condensation funnel may show. I did some in-depth satellite research on the Ivanovo Tornado, and the width of the most intense damage I could find definitely suggests the tornado was near a mile wide, if not even larger.

The Ivanovo Tornado's path on satellite can be seen towards the top of the image. What interests me the most about the Ivanovo Tornado's track is how it moved slightly to the NNE, rather than to the NNW, as what was the case with two other tornadic scars I was able to find. This suggests that the parent supercell responsible for the Ivanovo Tornado may have been subject to deviant flow motion, allowing it to take in more wind shear than the other supercells and produce a stronger tornado. However, the tornado's path quickly disappeared after leaving this forested area.



Two of the other scars appeared to come from the cycle of a second supercell, further to the west of the Ivanovo Supercell, with the second track starting further to the east of the initial one. Both tracks moved to the NNW as opposed to the NNE This suggests a high critical angle or a messy storm mode was responsible for the rather quick cycles of a supercell, although I believe that the latter is more likely given the sounding that ERA5 Analysis paints.

Here's the first of the two scars from that second supercell



The second and final scar I was able to find was much shorter but much larger



The low that ERA5 had was very intense (983 mb), and the satellite images paint a classic tropical-cyclone type setup, with the tornadoes occurring on the northeast side of the unusually intense surface low. The quick change in path direction from the Ivanovo supercell to the second supercell further to the west supports this theory as well. This would also explain the short path length, as given a surface low of that intensity, and with tropical cyclone-related tornado setups, it's going to be a messy convective mode with mergers choking off mesocyclones. That's probably what this Ivanovo Tornado Outbreak looked like. I was also unable to find any evidence of a tornado in the Kostroma area.

ERA5 had this for MSLP (Maximum Surface Low Pressure). The tornadoes occurred on the northeastern side of the low.



ERA5 Sounding for the prime tornado zone

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

It's hard to tell the true width of that tornado due to the fact that we don't know the base height, and that the tornadic circulation is always bigger than the actual condensation funnel may show. I did some in-depth satellite research on the Ivanovo Tornado, and the width of the most intense damage I could find definitely suggests the tornado was near a mile wide, if not even larger.

The Ivanovo Tornado's path on satellite can be seen towards the top of the image. What interests me the most about the Ivanovo Tornado's track is how it moved slightly to the NNE, rather than to the NNW, as what was the case with two other tornadic scars I was able to find. This suggests that the parent supercell responsible for the Ivanovo Tornado may have been subject to deviant flow motion, allowing it to take in more wind shear than the other supercells and produce a stronger tornado. However, the tornado's path quickly disappeared after leaving this forested area.

View attachment 6739

Two of the other scars appeared to come from the cycle of a second supercell, further to the west of the Ivanovo Supercell, with the second track starting further to the east of the initial one. Both tracks moved to the NNW as opposed to the NNE This suggests a high critical angle or a messy storm mode was responsible for the rather quick cycles of a supercell, although I believe that the latter is more likely given the sounding that ERA5 Analysis paints.

Here's the first of the two scars from that second supercell

View attachment 6740

The second and final scar I was able to find was much shorter but much larger

View attachment 6741

The low that ERA5 had was very intense (983 mb), and the satellite images paint a classic tropical-cyclone type setup, with the tornadoes occurring on the northeast side of the unusually intense surface low. The quick change in path direction from the Ivanovo supercell to the second supercell further to the west supports this theory as well. This would also explain the short path length, as given a surface low of that intensity, and with tropical cyclone-related tornado setups, it's going to be a messy convective mode with mergers choking off mesocyclones. That's probably what this Ivanovo Tornado Outbreak looked like. I was also unable to find any evidence of a tornado in the Kostroma area.

ERA5 had this for MSLP (Maximum Surface Low Pressure). The tornadoes occurred on the northeastern side of the low.

View attachment 6742

ERA5 Sounding for the prime tornado zone

View attachment 6743

Here's what I've been able to find out about that outbreak:

A link to a PDF file providing a useful overview of it (including supercell paths):

1. https://ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/ejssm/article/viewPDFInterstitial/98/82

Satellite of the setup:



I have a ton of damage photographs from this event from various Russian links (quite a bit are from the Ivanovo tornado family (that's what it seems to have been) but some are from other tornadoes of that day. Haven't been able to find any Kostroma photographs though. I'll upload damage photographs another time unless someone beats me to it.
Interesting fact; the date of this outbreak is June 9, 1984 the day after the Barneveld, WI F5 tornado. Lots of freak occurrences involving tornadoes happened in the 80s (this event, 5/31/85, 1987 Yellowstone, 1987 Edmonton, etc.). Perhaps there was some upper level setup in the atmosphere for that decade that allowed for uncommon events like this? Who knows?

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

Speaking of violent overseas tornado, I am always wandering 1996 Bangladesh tornado which killed more than 600 people.

Words cannot describe how insane this environment was. This kinds of environment certainly capable of producing violent tornados.
Some of the information of this tornado can be found in this article but I still want to find more. There was real survey about this tornado and showed that it travelled at least 25km and the maximum width reached 1.5KM. Rating of the tornado was F4.

Tornadoes in the districts of Jamalpur and Tangail in Bangladesh

By Thomas W. Schmidlin and Yuichi Ono, Published on 01/01/96

scholarcommons.usf.edu

View attachment 6732

The reason why Bangladesh tornadoes kill numerous people even if they are rather weak is due to very poor construction, a high population density and the lack of a warning system.

 

[Marshal79344]

Here's what I've been able to find out about that outbreak:

A link to a PDF file providing a useful overview of it (including supercell paths):

1. https://ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/ejssm/article/viewPDFInterstitial/98/82

Satellite of the setup:

View attachment 6744View attachment 6745View attachment 6746

I have a ton of damage photographs from this event from various Russian links (quite a bit are from the Ivanovo tornado family (that's what it seems to have been) but some are from other tornadoes of that day. Haven't been able to find any Kostroma photographs though. I'll upload damage photographs another time unless someone beats me to it.
Interesting fact; the date of this outbreak is June 9, 1984 the day after the Barneveld, WI F5 tornado. Lots of freak occurrences involving tornadoes happened in the 80s (this event, 5/31/85, 1987 Yellowstone, 1987 Edmonton, etc.). Perhaps there was some upper level setup in the atmosphere for that decade that allowed for uncommon events like this? Who knows?

Looks exactly like a tropical cyclone setup on satellite to me