Significant Tornado Events

[CheeselandSkies]

Some damage pictures from the 2003 Franklin, Kansas tornado:
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Aerial view of the devastation. Ground scouring and moderate wind rowing is evident.

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A vehicle was stripped to its chassis, with the chassis found embedded into the ground.

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Extreme ground scouring occurred throughout the path, with disruption of topsoil as well.

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The tornado reportedly scoured pavement from rural roads and this is the only image I can find of that possibly occurring (though I'm not sure if what we're seeing is actual pavement scouring or not)

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Trees and shrubs that sustained severe debarking. Honestly more intense than many official F5/EF5's including Greensburg

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A swept away home in Franklin (foundation visible behind the flag) with severe grass scouring in the immediate vicinity. This home was well-bolted to its foundation and one person died here.

5/4/03 seems to be relatively forgotten these days, even though it remains one of the most destructive and violent Plains outbreaks of the millennium to date.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Yeah agreed. I personally don’t think the Mira tornado had F5 potential based on the contextual damage I’ve seen, but construction over there is so different compared to the US, it makes comparisons a little more unclear. For example, this concrete and brick construction house in Mira was given an F4 rating based on the collapse of its second story, even the the whole building wasn’t leveled.
View attachment 9130

I wonder what the damage would have looked like if the same tornado had struck a modern US-style subdivision of cookie-cutter wood frame homes.

I know that many buildings in Europe (particularly western Europe ) are built with substantially heavier materials than in the US and likely require stronger winds to be destroyed, so perhaps what warrants an EF4 rating over there doesn't get any higher then EF3 over here. It does make it harder to assess the intensity of European tornado outbreaks, as one has to take into account European construction/architecture standards and how they stack up compared to US ones. I do know that meteorological boards in Europe are typically conservative when it comes to tornado ratings, so this might be an exception or it might not be (a building partially collapsed being rated F4 passes for conservative over there due to higher building codes). Just my two cents.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I'm sorry but if they want to actively restrict the free flow of valuable information by demanding payment for previously free articles out of nowhere then I don't shed too many tears when people do stuff like that. If they were only making new articles premium that would be one thing, but restricting access to already exisiting articles is another thing altogether.

The only thing I worry about is if TornadoTalk decides to file suit or shut down this forum because of someone posting articles for free on here. That said, it's irritating that stuff like the 1994 Appalachians Outbreak is now behind a paywall, as it's so hard to find information on that event. I understand stuff like Smithville or Hackleburg requiring payment (as those are newer events) but older ones shouldn't be restricted to paying consumers. Really frustrating how the "information superhighway" is becoming less and less "super" every year.

 

[WIL9287]

I'm sorry but if they want to actively restrict the free flow of valuable information by demanding payment for previously free articles out of nowhere then I don't shed too many tears when people do stuff like that. If they were only making new articles premium that would be one thing, but restricting access to already exisiting articles is another thing altogether.

As a main writer for Tornado Talk, let me chime in here.

What was posted was perfectly fine. Any of the maps we create in-house can be shared with credit to us and a link to the summary. However, we receive special permission for many of the photos in these summaries. Those photos are not to be shared anywhere without permission from the original photographers. This goes for our free and premium summaries. Pohnpei did not violate any terms of service.

Over 400 summaries remain free to read on the website. The original goal of the site was to have a summary for every day of the year. We have accomplished that goal and all of those (and more) are offered free. After much debate, we hand-selected summaries that were previously written to be moved under the paywall. There are many news sources (like newspaper sites) that archive articles that can only be seen now with a paid membership. All new summaries being published for our project on the April 25-28th Super Outbreak, which includes Rainsville that was published just yesterday, are under the paywall. A few of these will go free and stay free on April 27th. After a lot of debating on what to do, we decided to start a membership, which costs less than a cup of coffee per month for several reasons.

• It helps offset the server costs, which continues to go up with the number of summaries we add.
• It helps to keep us researching more events and write top-notch summaries.
• It helps us to go back when we are done with our Super Outbreak Project to revamp our older summaries.

We are not "actively restricting the free flow of valuable information." We are trying to validate the THOUSANDS of hours of time we are pouring into this and protecting our work and content that we are receiving as we dig into and interview people for these events.

The owner of Tornado Talk has spent thousands of dollars growing the brand. Becoming an LLC and starting the membership was the next logical step to try to balance how much things cost as the site grows.

We do have a "Tornado Tuesday" where every Tuesday, we release a premium article for free for 24 hours. This gives folks the opportunity to preview some of our work. And not all of our new summaries once we get past the Super Outbreak will be behind the paywall.

We are so grateful for the folks who have purchased a membership to help support our site. It is through that support that we are able to continue to write these amazing stories, and continue to offer so many articles for free.

 

[Robinson lee]

Does anyone know if there any cases of extreme damage from the 2016 Funing tornado typically seen in North American tornadoes such as ground scouring, severe debarking of hardwood trees, cars being thrown hundreds of yards and being mangled beyond recognition or wind-rowing of debris?

I've already posted on the forum about the vehicle damage caused by the tornado in Funing. This is one of the most serious vehicle damage outside North America. The other one is the peeling of low trees, but I don't know where it is
It is worth mentioning that the strong vehicle damage of Funing tornado was in Beichen village, where a large container was thrown out for almost half a kilometer, so there may be another peak possibility of tornado here
Funing tornado is different from Mongolia tornado in 2014 or miar tornado in 2015. Large tornado is not suitable to cause obvious ground erosion, but there is still grassland erosion in some places

 

[eric11]

There was definitely extensive debarking, as well as vehicles being badly mangled. I think our contributors from China likely have the best photos that show this, but I know of a few as well. Interestingly, whatever species of trees these are have reddish wood underneath the bark.

Last year's Viterbo, Italy tornado was pretty intense based on some of the damage photos I've seen

Talking about Funing, my friends have presented a lot nasty damage pics, so here's just my collection, some of them you may have already seen.

 

[eric11]

The before-after comparison viewing Funing's track using GE

The container mentioned above is a 2.5 ton empty one flew about 200-250 yrds with no ground contact, landed on a destroyed brick house, I believe AT LEAST one container was thrown and may be there's more.

 

[Robinson lee]

Another container, which weighs 2.5 tons and is located near the atlas plant, was thrown out of 200-250m. Another paper mentioned that the container in Beichen village was thrown out of 400-500m, which means that Funing tornado may have thrown out at least two containers

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

The before-after comparison viewing Funing's track using GE
View attachment 9160View attachment 9161View attachment 9162View attachment 9163View attachment 9164View attachment 9165
The container mentioned above is a 2.5 ton empty one flew about 200-250 yrds with no ground contact, landed on a destroyed brick house, I believe AT LEAST one container was thrown and may be there's more.
View attachment 9166View attachment 9167

Assuming I'm looking at them correctly, that first set of photos reminds me of Jarrell in terms of nothing but brown soil and debris left. Unless of course the photos are tinted to make the colors on the ground appear different.

 

[TH2002]

As a main writer for Tornado Talk, let me chime in here.

What was posted was perfectly fine. Any of the maps we create in-house can be shared with credit to us and a link to the summary. However, we receive special permission for many of the photos in these summaries. Those photos are not to be shared anywhere without permission from the original photographers. This goes for our free and premium summaries. Pohnpei did not violate any terms of service.

Over 400 summaries remain free to read on the website. The original goal of the site was to have a summary for every day of the year. We have accomplished that goal and all of those (and more) are offered free. After much debate, we hand-selected summaries that were previously written to be moved under the paywall. There are many news sources (like newspaper sites) that archive articles that can only be seen now with a paid membership. All new summaries being published for our project on the April 25-28th Super Outbreak, which includes Rainsville that was published just yesterday, are under the paywall. A few of these will go free and stay free on April 27th. After a lot of debating on what to do, we decided to start a membership, which costs less than a cup of coffee per month for several reasons.

• It helps offset the server costs, which continues to go up with the number of summaries we add.
• It helps to keep us researching more events and write top-notch summaries.
• It helps us to go back when we are done with our Super Outbreak Project to revamp our older summaries.

We are not "actively restricting the free flow of valuable information." We are trying to validate the THOUSANDS of hours of time we are pouring into this and protecting our work and content that we are receiving as we dig into and interview people for these events.

The owner of Tornado Talk has spent thousands of dollars growing the brand. Becoming an LLC and starting the membership was the next logical step to try to balance how much things cost as the site grows.

We do have a "Tornado Tuesday" where every Tuesday, we release a premium article for free for 24 hours. This gives folks the opportunity to preview some of our work. And not all of our new summaries once we get past the Super Outbreak will be behind the paywall.

We are so grateful for the folks who have purchased a membership to help support our site. It is through that support that we are able to continue to write these amazing stories, and continue to offer so many articles for free.

I am not at all saying it's bad for TornadoTalk to secure a source of income. That's how you keep the lights on. What I AM saying is that putting articles that were previously free behind a paywall, was not exactly a good move in my opinion. When [news site] puts previously free articles behind a paywall (which is honestly a HUGE reason why I barely pay any attention to mainstream media anymore), the tactic doesn't become any better when TornadoTalk does the same thing. Two wrongs don't make a right.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

Assuming I'm looking at them correctly, that first set of photos reminds me of Jarrell in terms of nothing but brown soil and debris left. Unless of course the photos are tinted to make the colors on the ground appear different.

No the scouring isn't that extensive. It is just tinted like that.

 

[zvl5316]

Assuming I'm looking at them correctly, that first set of photos reminds me of Jarrell in terms of nothing but brown soil and debris left. Unless of course the photos are tinted to make the colors on the ground appear different.

I think it is caused by harvest works there just before the violent tornado hit.

 

[eric11]

Assuming I'm looking at them correctly, that first set of photos reminds me of Jarrell in terms of nothing but brown soil and debris left. Unless of course the photos are tinted to make the colors on the ground appear different.

Not that "clean" as Jarrell but the damage swath was extremely wide, I didn't have the exact number of EF4 damage points but the conference I attended last year mentioned there are AT LEAST hundreds of EF4 damage points, and these points just scattered around the track, many of them were close to the centerline, however, some of them could be found at the outer edge of the damage path, assuming that tons of subvortices aid to this.
Also would like to mention about the different method used by Chinese Survey Team in field survey. The Chinese Survey Team tend to use drones rather than drive into the hardest hit area in person, the drones photograph the damage in multiple angle at different height, and then they embed the damage pics into GE, mapping the damage points using Micaps (a special Chinese severe weather platform used for drawing and analyzing weather chart, atomsphere heating, kinematics,etc), sth like DAT but not the exact same.
Here's some aerial photos in this article

[PDF] Recent significant tornadoes in China | Semantic Scholar

Compared with the United States, whose annual number of tornadoes can exceed 1000, the average number of tornadoes per year in China over the past half a century is estimated to be fewer than 100 (Fan and Yu, 2015), even though both countries are located in a similar latitudinal zone of the...

www.semanticscholar.org

Back to the topic, the scouring for Funing I think actually is a little bit easier to be done than Jarrell.Farmland where the tornado passed is called rice paddy fields, In China, we will plough the dirt and dig some ditches to fill in water before we grow the rice paddy(Cuz it's a crop need amounts of water to grow), thus would lead to the field being more soft and muddy than the original fields like corn field or sunflower field, but still, we haven't seen such scouring ever occurred in this area except Funing.

 

[CheeselandSkies]

While not too significant in the scheme of things (fortunately), it appears at least from this video that the tornado near Lockett, TX today was rather impressive and probably had at least "strong" (EF2-3) damage potential.

 

[eric11]

Haven't seen anyone else mentioned this before even NWS Norman seemed to have missed this place during their damage survey.This is a completely leveled foster home close to I-40 near Calumet OK during the 2011 El Reno-Piedmont EF5.The house located only a quarter of a mile away to the Calumet Factory (which was applied an EF3 rating by NWS Norman) and not far from the Cactus-117 oil rig site. However, if the extreme damage near Cactus-117 oil rig site can be called "extreme", I'd like to call the damage around this house "uncomprehensible". The house itself was swept clean, that's common for an EF5, but, meanwhile, the stone storm cellar of the house was cracked, left a big hole and actually I think it was being pulled out by the unbelievable force of the wind.We've seen concrete or cement foundation being slightly cracked by extremely violent tornadoes like Chapman and Hackleburg. But a stone storm cellar? Oh man that's something else, I do not think I've ever seen this type of damage and have no idea how strong the wind can be to tear a stone storm cellar, and what's more ridiculous is that, El reno was still strengthening at this point! A few miles to the east, the DOW measured a 295.5mph wind speed.



The family owner of this house hid in the storm cellar and remained miraculously unhurt. However their white pickup were thrown more than 600 yards away and only a engine can be found caked in the mud, the body of the pickup just vanished.

Several Tractors and Combines at this site weren't able to survive either. A heavy combine left only four tires, the rest part vanished as well.

This tractor was only left with an mangled axle, the houseowner described he walked down several hundred feet only to recover one tire, the other part of the tractor was nowhere to find

Ground scouring near the house was also "uncomprehensible".Tons of debris from the house, the factory and even the Cactus-117 oil rig were mixed together, granulated into small pieces and scattered across the muddy fields.

 

[TH2002]

Here are some very rare tornado videos that have almost become pieces of lost media:

First video is of the 8/24/2006 Nicollet, MN tornado, filmed by two storm chasers.
Have you seen this picture of the tornado?

This photo was taken by Joshua Jans. He was one of the people behind this particular storm chase.
Here's the video, which has already been unlisted for unknown reasons. The site which originally offered the video for download also no longer has the video at all.



Second video is of a large wedge tornado that occurred near the town of Shatuny, Nytvensky district, Perm Krai, Russia. Unfortunately haven't been able to find any information on damage the tornado caused. The video was originally on the page of a meteorology group on VK, but has since been completely removed from that platform and this YouTube upload has again been unlisted for unknown reasons:



My only advice about videos like these: Save them while you can, before they become completely lost like the Anderson Hills tornado footage. Let's see how many tornado videos we can save from suffering the same fate.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Haven't seen anyone else mentioned this before even NWS Norman seemed to have missed this place during their damage survey.This is a completely leveled foster home close to I-40 near Calumet OK during the 2011 El Reno-Piedmont EF5.The house located only a quarter of a mile away to the Calumet Factory (which was applied an EF3 rating by NWS Norman) and not far from the Cactus-117 oil rig site. However, if the extreme damage near Cactus-117 oil rig site can be called "extreme", I'd like to call the damage around this house "uncomprehensible". The house itself was swept clean, that's common for an EF5, but, meanwhile, the stone storm cellar of the house was cracked, left a big hole and actually I think it was being pulled out by the unbelievable force of the wind.We've seen concrete or cement foundation being slightly cracked by extremely violent tornadoes like Chapman and Hackleburg. But a stone storm cellar? Oh man that's something else, I do not think I've ever seen this type of damage and have no idea how strong the wind can be to tear a stone storm cellar, and what's more ridiculous is that, El reno was still strengthening at this point! A few miles to the east, the DOW measured a 295.5mph wind speed.
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The family owner of this house hid in the storm cellar and remained miraculously unhurt. However their white pickup were thrown more than 600 yards away and only a engine can be found caked in the mud, the body of the pickup just vanished.
View attachment 9172
Several Tractors and Combines at this site weren't able to survive either. A heavy combine left only four tires, the rest part vanished as well.
View attachment 9173
This tractor was only left with an mangled axle, the houseowner described he walked down several hundred feet only to recover one tire, the other part of the tractor was nowhere to find
View attachment 9174View attachment 9175
Ground scouring near the house was also "uncomprehensible".Tons of debris from the house, the factory and even the Cactus-117 oil rig were mixed together, granulated into small pieces and scattered across the muddy fields.
View attachment 9176View attachment 9177View attachment 9178

Holy crap. I know Rainsville managed to partially heave an underground storm cellar out of the soil, but it didn't crack it like El Reno here did. The damage to the pickup truck reminds me of the 1990 Hitchcock County, NE tornado where a vehicle vanished and the owners were only able to find the grill and bumper of it for insurance purposes. Crazy. Stuff like this makes me wonder if El Reno 2011 was more intense than Bridge Creek-Moore 1999 or Moore 2013 (I'd say yes in both cases). Near the Cactus drilling site there was a junkyard that was supposedly obliterated, have you been able to find any pictures of that?

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Here are some very rare tornado videos that have almost become pieces of lost media:

First video is of the 8/24/2006 Nicollet, MN tornado, filmed by two storm chasers.
Have you seen this picture of the tornado?

This photo was taken by Joshua Jans. He was one of the people behind this particular storm chase.
Here's the video, which has already been unlisted for unknown reasons. The site which originally offered the video for download also no longer has the video at all.



Second video is of a large wedge tornado that occurred near the town of Shatuny, Nytvensky district, Perm Krai, Russia. Unfortunately haven't been able to find any information on damage the tornado caused. The video was originally on the page of a meteorology group on VK, but has since been completely removed from that platform and this YouTube upload has again been unlisted for unknown reasons:



My only advice about videos like these: Save them while you can, before they become completely lost like the Anderson Hills tornado footage. Let's see how many tornado videos we can save from suffering the same fate.

I have a feeling some footage of Red Rock has become unlisted on YouTube, I'm trying to find these videos I used to find easily before they vanished for whatever reason.
Also, that first photo of Nicollet I've seen attributed as Rochelle, IL or a couple of 4/27/11 tornadoes. Interesting stuff.

 

[TH2002]

I have a feeling some footage of Red Rock has become unlisted on YouTube, I'm trying to find these videos I used to find easily before they vanished for whatever reason.
Also, that first photo of Nicollet I've seen attributed as Rochelle, IL or a couple of 4/27/11 tornadoes. Interesting stuff.

Can you describe what happens in the particular footage you're looking for?

Unfortunately the only way to find unlisted videos is to hope someone added them to a tornado playlist, that's how I found those two videos.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Can you describe what happens in the particular footage you're looking for?

Unfortunately the only way to find unlisted videos is to hope someone added them to a tornado playlist, that's how I found those two videos.

It's the one that ends with dead cattle wedged underneath a guardrail.