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What I’m trying to say is there is no way to definitively determine if there was intense debarking of any kind from that grainy, aerial, black and white photo. But if you have no ability to objectively analyze a damage photo, you’re just always going to see exactly what you’re looking for.

When that’s the case, every tree is “debarked” and all ground is “scoured”. Some things never change apparently.
I guess this guy still won't stop or never learns. Really hoping this thread doesn't get derailed yet again. Not you buckeye, the person you responded to.
 

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Juliett, i noticed you were from Missouri and i’m very curious, how old were you when the Joplin tornado occured? Did you ever get to see any of the damage from it?
 

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I should be writing the rest of the Tupelo - Gainesville article, but I always feel like I'll end up missing something if I stop researching. Case in point: I found out today that there was a storm in McMinn & Monroe Co, TN (roughly between Athens & Madisonville) that caused some pretty substantial damage. I've never seen it officially recorded as a tornado, but nine TVA 110,000-volt steel transmission towers in the area were "twisted from their concrete foundations and bent around like ribbons." Not far away, a number of homes were "blown away" and a school building was "flattened." There were several serious injuries and "heavy" loss of livestock.

I also found a report of significant damage in Marion County; one home was "torn from its foundation" and several others were badly damaged. Trees were uprooted and debarked in some cases. Most interestingly, people from a community just outside the damage swath reportedly heard the storm "roar" past.

Obviously, it's always hard to judge the veracity of such accounts, but it's pretty compelling. Mapping out the damage from these two events, the general direction + timing also seems to suggest they may have been from the same supercell. The hardest-hit areas are ~70 miles apart, but there seems to have been other scattered damage in between as well.

This is in addition to the several other reports of considerable damage that I mentioned a while back. At this point, I think we can pretty safely say this was a legit tornado outbreak. If these reports were indeed all tornadoes, mapping everything out suggests there may have been at least five cyclic supercells on April 5 alone, all of which (except the Arkansas storm) produced multiple tornadoes. And a few of which may have produced multiple violent tornadoes.

Pretty impressive.
 

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2020 China tornado annual review shows that last year there were 7 EF2 and 1 EF3 tornado occurred in China. The EF3 tornado occurred on July 22 with a path about 62KM, which was the longest tornado ever recorded in China with formal investigation available. As a comparison, Funing EF4 2016 had a path of 34KM and Kaiyuan EF4 had a path of 15KM. The rating was based on transmission tower damage and container being brown away.
Img_2021-03-23-09-30-57.jpgImg_2021-03-23-09-32-34.jpgImg_2021-03-23-09-32-51.jpg
 
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I should be writing the rest of the Tupelo - Gainesville article, but I always feel like I'll end up missing something if I stop researching. Case in point: I found out today that there was a storm in McMinn & Monroe Co, TN (roughly between Athens & Madisonville) that caused some pretty substantial damage. I've never seen it officially recorded as a tornado, but nine TVA 110,000-volt steel transmission towers in the area were "twisted from their concrete foundations and bent around like ribbons." Not far away, a number of homes were "blown away" and a school building was "flattened." There were several serious injuries and "heavy" loss of livestock.

I also found a report of significant damage in Marion County; one home was "torn from its foundation" and several others were badly damaged. Trees were uprooted and debarked in some cases. Most interestingly, people from a community just outside the damage swath reportedly heard the storm "roar" past.

Obviously, it's always hard to judge the veracity of such accounts, but it's pretty compelling. Mapping out the damage from these two events, the general direction + timing also seems to suggest they may have been from the same supercell. The hardest-hit areas are ~70 miles apart, but there seems to have been other scattered damage in between as well.

This is in addition to the several other reports of considerable damage that I mentioned a while back. At this point, I think we can pretty safely say this was a legit tornado outbreak. If these reports were indeed all tornadoes, mapping everything out suggests there may have been at least five cyclic supercells on April 5 alone, all of which (except the Arkansas storm) produced multiple tornadoes. And a few of which may have produced multiple violent tornadoes.

Pretty impressive.
Amazing how poorly-documented so many outbreaks of the past were, really makes you wonder how many incredible events have been lost to time and memory. Stuff like this solidifies my belief that so many of the most violent tornadoes of the past ~50 years are mostly unknown events due to having occurred in remote and rural areas and didn't have much media coverage, so we have to go on are eyewitness accounts that may or may not be accurate.
 
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Juliett, i noticed you were from Missouri and i’m very curious, how old were you when the Joplin tornado occured? Did you ever get to see any of the damage from it?
I had just graduated high school when it occurred. I'm from the Kansas City area so nowhere near Joplin so no, I never saw any damage in person. I had some friends that did, though. I've seen tons of photographs that they took, though and are easily available via google images.
 
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I should be writing the rest of the Tupelo - Gainesville article, but I always feel like I'll end up missing something if I stop researching. Case in point: I found out today that there was a storm in McMinn & Monroe Co, TN (roughly between Athens & Madisonville) that caused some pretty substantial damage. I've never seen it officially recorded as a tornado, but nine TVA 110,000-volt steel transmission towers in the area were "twisted from their concrete foundations and bent around like ribbons." Not far away, a number of homes were "blown away" and a school building was "flattened." There were several serious injuries and "heavy" loss of livestock.

I also found a report of significant damage in Marion County; one home was "torn from its foundation" and several others were badly damaged. Trees were uprooted and debarked in some cases. Most interestingly, people from a community just outside the damage swath reportedly heard the storm "roar" past.

Obviously, it's always hard to judge the veracity of such accounts, but it's pretty compelling. Mapping out the damage from these two events, the general direction + timing also seems to suggest they may have been from the same supercell. The hardest-hit areas are ~70 miles apart, but there seems to have been other scattered damage in between as well.

This is in addition to the several other reports of considerable damage that I mentioned a while back. At this point, I think we can pretty safely say this was a legit tornado outbreak. If these reports were indeed all tornadoes, mapping everything out suggests there may have been at least five cyclic supercells on April 5 alone, all of which (except the Arkansas storm) produced multiple tornadoes. And a few of which may have produced multiple violent tornadoes.

Pretty impressive.
Interesting that Marion County came up; yet another tornado event occurring there. So many of the exact same counties (Franklin, Lamar, Limestone, Madison, Marion, Marshall) are struck over and over and over again. What is the deal?
 
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I wonder what the Tri-State tornado's debris ball and radar signature would have looked like. It'd probably be unprecedented (at least the debris ball would be).

Quoted from the EF-debate thread but probably more suited to this one. It, Palm Sunday 1965 and 4/3/74 are probably my top three for historical tornadoes/outbreaks I'd like to be able to analyze with modern NEXRAD. The Texas Panhandle to Woodward, OK tornado family from April 1947 is up there as well.
 

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Those big fire weather troughs sometimes indirectly produce fire tornadoes though that doesn’t really matter. Also I have some damage photos from the Bucca tornado and reportedly it scoured grass according to some eyewitness reports.

<big pics>
Well there ain't no F4 damage in those pictures. Never seem them before, but they popped up on Google so it might just be that long since I last looked! There's a small article http://hardenup.org/umbraco/customContent/media/596_Gladstone_Tornado_Bucca_1992.pdf which doesn't mention ground scouring but when you google the original BoM report it only highlights the citation on Wikipedia. Seems it was a short tracked event, which is fairly standard here. There used to be a lot more discussion on historic tornadoes on the Weatherzone forum but it was deleted when the host changed hands, and the old Australian Severe Weather forum as well but it's been dead for years (and I once got a virus off the search function there). Unfortunately most of the sites I used to follow for severe whether in Australia are dead.

May as well post the photo series from the old Brisbane Storm Chasers site.

291192_04.jpg 291192_05.jpg
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One thing I've noted looking at reports of Australian tornadoes is that there seem to be more significant events reported around the turn of the nineteenth century than now. I do wonder if there is some climate influence but the rural population was also much higher and more dispersed than it is now - most of the small towns off major tourist routes are pretty much dead these days. There was a significant outbreak on 19/11/1897 in Western Victoria and Allen thinks that there may have been as many as 40 tornadoes, that would be by far the biggest outbreak. Narrabri was hit in 1900 and 1902 causing considerable damage each time and there was also the 1918 'Brighton Cyclone' in Melbourne.

The Brisbane tornado of 4/11/73, a low end F3 (maybe?) with a track of 51 km was probably our most destructive and was also filmed. http://hardenup.org/umbraco/customContent/media/609_Brisbane_Cyclone_1973.pdf




An interesting aside is that despite the small number of tornadoes and the sparse weather station coverage in Australia there have actually been two recent instances of tornadoes hitting weather stations. The first was at Scottsdale in Tasmania on 15/4/09 2009 and recorded a wind speed of 194 km/h and a pressure of 958 hPa https://www.publish.csiro.au/es/pdf/ES18012.
The other was at Kurnell near Sydney on 16/12/16 where a wind gauge recorded 213 km/h. It caused high end F1 to low end F2 damage if I recall correctly. If you consider where the breaks on the F and EF scales are compared to that... well I'll leave that for readers to consider.

By the way, if you want an example of Australia's tornado illiteracy (aside from the fact you'll often see it in quotes: 'tornado', if it's not mini), after the Mulwala storm someone posted a claimed picture which was clearly the Elie F5, and it made it into multiple news articles.
 
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Well there ain't no F4 damage in those pictures. Never seem them before, but they popped up on Google so it might just be that long since I last looked! There's a small article http://hardenup.org/umbraco/customContent/media/596_Gladstone_Tornado_Bucca_1992.pdf which doesn't mention ground scouring but when you google the original BoM report it only highlights the citation on Wikipedia. Seems it was a short tracked event, which is fairly standard here. There used to be a lot more discussion on historic tornadoes on the Weatherzone forum but it was deleted when the host changed hands, and the old Australian Severe Weather forum as well but it's been dead for years (and I once got a virus off the search function there). Unfortunately most of the sites I used to follow for severe whether in Australia are dead.

May as well post the photo series from the old Brisbane Storm Chasers site.

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One thing I've noted looking at reports of Australian tornadoes is that there seem to be more significant events reported around the turn of the nineteenth century than now. I do wonder if there is some climate influence but the rural population was also much higher and more dispersed than it is now - most of the small towns off major tourist routes are pretty much dead these days. There was a significant outbreak on 19/11/1897 in Western Victoria and Allen thinks that there may have been as many as 40 tornadoes, that would be by far the biggest outbreak. Narrabri was hit in 1900 and 1902 causing considerable damage each time and there was also the 1918 'Brighton Cyclone' in Melbourne.

The Brisbane tornado of 4/11/73, a low end F3 (maybe?) with a track of 51 km was probably our most destructive and was also filmed. http://hardenup.org/umbraco/customContent/media/609_Brisbane_Cyclone_1973.pdf




An interesting aside is that despite the small number of tornadoes and the sparse weather station coverage in Australia there have actually been two recent instances of tornadoes hitting weather stations. The first was at Scottsdale in Tasmania on 15/4/09 2009 and recorded a wind speed of 194 km/h and a pressure of 958 hPa https://www.publish.csiro.au/es/pdf/ES18012.
The other was at Kurnell near Sydney on 16/12/16 where a wind gauge recorded 213 km/h. It caused high end F1 to low end F2 damage if I recall correctly. If you consider where the breaks on the F and EF scales are compared to that... well I'll leave that for readers to consider.

By the way, if you want an example of Australia's tornado illiteracy (aside from the fact you'll often see it in quotes: 'tornado', if it's not mini), after the Mulwala storm someone posted a claimed picture which was clearly the Elie F5, and it made it into multiple news articles.

I’ve never heard of this 1897 outbreak. Do you have any more details on it such as what was the strongest event?
 
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The rating of the Mulwala tornado is a bit more complex than that (I was pleased to see it got a mention in this thread BTW). It's officially recorded as an F3 on the Bureau of Meteorology database (which is absolutely horrendous and includes no other information), and the Tamleaugh-Swanpool tornado from the same day, which tracked about 60 km, an F1. The most intense damage I damage photograph I saw (but didn't save and it's over five years since I saw it) was low-end F3 - a two story house had the entire upper story removed. It's worth pointing out that at least since the 90s or so Australian building standards are much higher than the US average, because though there is some variation with likelihood of certain threats, we share our standards with earthquake-prone New Zealand.

The EF4 rating (and EF3 for the Tamleaugh tornado) was applied by the BoM meteorologist Coombs, whose presentation you might have seen. That rating appears to be inferred rather than derived directly from DIs, as there were almost no DIs other than trees on the stronger (left) side of the path, or in general really. This is supported by tree damage and a 335 km/h reading from the Yarrawonga radar, which the tornado passed very close to. So far as I know it caused no actual EF4 building damage. Tree damage itself is also a bit more difficult as many Eucalypts shed thin outer bark (that fuels our famous bushfires) and it's hard tell if this or live bark was removed. That rating is very liberal and would never pass in the US, although as we have a thread complaining about, some recent ratings there are ridiculous low-balls (I'm convinced if April 27 was rated the way it's been done recently we'd only end up with 2-3 EF5s, they wouldn't upgrade Rainsville and the ground damage at Philadelphia isn't a standard DI, they seem to be less inclined to call a spade a spade now). The most disappointing thing is that a formal paper was never published on it.

There is an Australian researcher currently at Central Michigan University, John T. Allen, who has done some work on Australian tornado climatology - he was actually intending to publish in 2016 but still hasn't got around to it, and has a paper on tornadoes in 2013 going to press in the MWR soon. He gave the Mulwala storm an F3 rating. Ratings in Australia are very ad-hoc and it's only been recently they've been done officially and formally at all. We officially use the F scale and not the EF scale. This lead to some silly situations, like a 2016 outbreak in the Southern Flinders ranges, where they used the EF DIs and 'converted' them back to F-scale windspeed. There is only one definite violent tornado in the database, the Bucca Queensland F4 on 29/11/1997, but as far as I know even that is not 'official' as such and is based off reports similar to the pre-1971 F-scale ratings. Unfortunately the original report is unobtainium and though I have some photographs of the tornado I have never seen one of the damage.

So far as people's attitude to them here, while with the internet there is less of a perception that they don't happen at all, they certainly aren't put on the same level. Most of our tornadoes here are very small and short lived, and often lack the full condensation funnel that makes a tornado look 'tornadoey'. Bigger ones are very rare and even more rarely caught on camera. The Mulwala event was by far the most significant for at least 21 years. And it's led a 'tornado = mini tornado' mindset. In the South fire and drought dominate all other weather worries.

Australia's climate is not very good for tornadoes, especially big ones. While there was a period where it was thought we might get 2-300 a year at a time when the US was thought to get about 6-800, we now know it's more like 20-30 at the most (the last few years have been very barren, with only a few reports, and the severe storm seasons have been bad in general), though Allen thanks it may be closer to 50. Far from being 'second after the US/Canada' as was once sometimes asserted, conditions are less favourable than the Rio de Plata region, Bengal, Europe, China and probably a few other places as well.
The basic issues is we are too dry, too far north and have the wrong terrain. As a result it is very rare to get the required combination of moisture, instability, shear and helicity to produce strong to violent tornadoes. Usually one or more is missing. Moisture is the biggest, because the synoptic scale systems advect over desert dew points over 15°C aren't common outside of tropical-influenced areas. This leads to weak, high-based storms. Also hard to get an EML when there's a hot desert near sea level directly upwind - the USA's terrain is much better arranged.
Shear is quite hard too, moister troughs are often weak and slow moving, low shear and produce intense rainfall instead. Meanwhile the strongest low level shear is usually with cold fronts that have boundary parallel flow and little helicity.
Tornadic supercells associated with large scale systems that produce the classic east-southeast tracks aren't that common and occur in a scattered area especially on the windward side of the Great Dividing Range and the plains in Central-West NSW etc. Coastal supercells tend towards hail/rain. Those in SE Queensland are quite different, associated with somewhat smaller troughs. These tend bud off the NSW/QLD Border Ranges and move NE and are usually HP cells with big hail - there have been some very destructive hailstorms recently. Storm modes in general tend towards HP or just generally messy, when supercells occur at all. There is a much higher proportion of cool season tornadoes, probably about half although conditions are expected to become less favourable. These are usually generated by low-topped supercells (as low as 8 km) embedded in or ahead of cold fronts. Western Australia and Victoria are the most common places for these.

Overall there simply aren't the conditions to get big tornado outbreaks. The best analogy to the big outbreak producing days like those in the US is probably our big bushfire 'blow up' days in Victoria and SE NSW like 16/2/1983 or 7/2/2009. These are prefrontal trough driven and have strong low level shear with the air coming directly off the central deserts, humidity under 10% and sea level equivalent temps over 40°C. The surface based mixed layer on the dry adiabat can be 4-5 km deep, if you chopped the bottom off and replaced it with humid air it'd resemble your US tornado setup. Helicity can be very high close to the trough as well - I once saw a picture of the Churchill fire from 7/2/2009 (when fires killed 173 people) where the smoke plume was bent nearly 90°. This is where you get the big fire events where single fires burn 25,000 hectares or more in a few hours.

About 15-20 years ago there was a TV show called "Storm Warning!" I forget what channel it was on but it was kind of like The Weather Channel's "Storm Stories," in which they would talk about 2-3 different significant weather events around the world per episode, with a little bit of the science/meteorology behind it interspersed with survivor stories. In one episode they talked about a supercell which developed off the Nullarbor Plain. It didn't produce a tornado, but it did produce giant, damaging hail. Do you know what event that might be?
 

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Damage from the 1942 Capitol Hill OK tornado, the deadliest OKC tornado until 1999. It was given an F4 rating by Grazulis and the vehicle damage is extremely impressive. 35 people died in an area 2.3 miles long and up to 500 yards wide.
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A Guy

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I’ve never heard of this 1897 outbreak. Do you have any more details on it such as what was the strongest event?
It's only mentioned in this conference abstract: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/ECSS2015/ECSS2015-144.pdf

I don't know how Allen managed to get 40 out of it though. I've been itching for years for him to publish his climatology but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't have any more details aside from the newspaper records cited on Wikipedia (you can find them using the wonderful Trove database). There were at least four with a very detructive tornado in Nhill, one death in Donald and two in Maryborough. Nhill and Maryborough are 200 km apart so the outbreak must have been of a considerable extent.

Interestingly papers back then had no problem using the term tornado unqualified.
 

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It's only mentioned in this conference abstract: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/ECSS2015/ECSS2015-144.pdf

I don't know how Allen managed to get 40 out of it though. I've been itching for years for him to publish his climatology but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't have any more details aside from the newspaper records cited on Wikipedia (you can find them using the wonderful Trove database). There were at least four with a very detructive tornado in Nhill, one death in Donald and two in Maryborough. Nhill and Maryborough are 200 km apart so the outbreak must have been of a considerable extent.

Interestingly papers back then had no problem using the term tornado unqualified.
I wonder if there were any violent tornadoes during such a large outbreak for the region. I guess I’ll check the newspaper archives.
 

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(you can find them using the wonderful Trove database)
As an aside, the Trove database is absolutely phenomenal. I relied on that for probably 80% of the research for Cyclone Mahina. I also found several other cyclones with extremely low recorded pressures (usually by ship captains, but occasionally land-based barometers). Sort of suggests there have been plenty of high-end extreme weather events Down Under that we know little to nothing about, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising considering how vast and sparsely populated much of the continent was (and is).
 
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