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Yeah, I don't doubt there was some crazy debris transport w/the Tri-State. I came across a few cases of things being carried 50-100 miles, but I'm sure there were many more instances that no one happened to notice. Probably true for a lot of violent tornadoes for that matter.

Since we're on the topic, kind of a funny coincidence that I just got done writing about 5/3/99, where an airport was damaged and an airplane wing was carried 30+ miles, and now I recently found out that something similar happened w/the Niles-Wheatland tornado. It struck a small private "airport" (more of a little landing strip) and tore up several planes stored there, with one piece of wing later being found ~24 miles away.

hermitage-airport-buhl-clarke.jpg
Yeah I knew it hit an airport at Hermitage but never saw any photographs from it before until know. Really neat.
Have you been able to find any pictures of damage done in Portage County where it touched down either at or near the Ravenna Arsenal (now known as Camp James A. Garfield)? Be interesting to see anything from that area.
 

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I've got a photo of the first place where it did property damage (a trailer just east of the arsenal that was destroyed), but nothing from inside it yet. Did talk to someone who was there and watched it form, though, so I think I've got the touchdown point nailed down pretty close. From what I understand there was just some minor tree damage there.

The couple who lived there weren't home at the time, but the woman was down in Newton Falls at the Sparkle Market. The tornado ended up hitting that area just as she was pulling out into the road to go home. She was knocked out and woke up laying in the street with her car a few hundred feet away in a nearby yard. I dunno if that's really good luck or really bad lol

Edit: I'm dumb, just realized I forgot to include the photo.

xjV5rFd.jpg
 
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Might as well post this too. The person who sent it to me said that it's from the Wheatland area but they don't know where. I haven't tried to match it up yet and I probably won't use it without more info, so:

dANRmYI.jpg
This looks like a creek bed or something that the tornado followed, what's remarkable is how narrow the damage swath is, as you can see a house in the upper left and the lower left corner of the photo that doesn't have a scratch on it. Crazy.
 

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Have you found any intense debarking/scouring from the Wheatland tornado?
Certainly nothing like some of the most violent Plains/Dixie tornadoes, but like we were talking about the other day in this thread, I'm not sure if that's even realistically possible up here. There was definitely some pretty pronounced vegetation damage in some areas, though. Also with a couple of other tornadoes, actually.
 
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Certainly nothing like some of the most violent Plains/Dixie tornadoes, but like we were talking about the other day in this thread, I'm not sure if that's even realistically possible up here. There was definitely some pretty pronounced vegetation damage in some areas, though. Also with a couple of other tornadoes, actually.
It often seems like tornadoes that occur in the Ohio River Valley area of the country (like Wheatland) fail to debark trees and/or scour topsoil. It's probably a tree/soil species thing, but I'm not sure. Asphalt was scoured in Wheatland, I know but no instances of bare ground that I am aware of.
 

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This looks like a creek bed or something that the tornado followed, what's remarkable is how narrow the damage swath is, as you can see a house in the upper left and the lower left corner of the photo that doesn't have a scratch on it. Crazy.
It's insane. I've got one photo in which the person's home is completely leveled, and their neighbor's house is in the background looking like you'd never even know there was a storm. Many of the aerial photos throughout the path show the same thing. The total damage path is sometimes more than half a mile wide, and in some spots fairly significant damage extends 300-400 yards, but often the extreme damage is like < 50 yards.
 

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It often seems like tornadoes that occur in the Ohio River Valley area of the country (like Wheatland) fail to debark trees and/or scour topsoil. It's probably a tree/soil species thing, but I'm not sure. Asphalt was scoured in Wheatland, I know but no instances of bare ground that I am aware of.
There was ground scouring in several areas, just not to a really extreme depth. I'd imagine the rapid forward speed also had something to do with that - a ridiculously narrow core moving at 45-50 mph doesn't leave much time for scouring.
 

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Re: the very narrow core, another interesting thing is that it still had a multivortex structure in at least some areas. The damage patterns bear that out, and several of the people I talked to who saw the tornado mentioned some variation of "two (or more) tornadoes spinning around and merging together." Must have been little subvortices the size of garden hoses lol
 
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Re: the very narrow core, another interesting thing is that it still had a multivortex structure in at least some areas. The damage patterns bear that out, and several of the people I talked to who saw the tornado mentioned some variation of "two (or more) tornadoes spinning around and merging together." Must have been little subvortices the size of garden hoses lol
I was about to ask if it was multivortex or not, as I haven't seen much clear cut proof of intense subvortices in damage aerials (there's a couple of aerials from Ohio that MIGHT be proof of a subvortex path but I'm not entirely sure). I thought the tornado was just a narrow drillbit for most of its path, ala Pampa, TX. I know Fujita described suction vortices in Xenia as being "like spaghetti" and I think that lots of suction vortices are really tiny in diameter; sometimes only a couple feet or less across so I'm guessing that's what probably happened with this tornado.
There was ground scouring in several areas, just not to a really extreme depth. I'd imagine the rapid forward speed also had something to do with that - a ridiculously narrow core moving at 45-50 mph doesn't leave much time for scouring.
This is what makes the ground scouring from events like Smithville, Hackleburg, Guin, and various other fast-moving tornadoes all the more impressive, considering they were more at 70+ mph.
 
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I've been trying to save everything for my article, but I can't help myself. One of the other tornadoes that caused notable vegetation damage (and one that I think was underrated) was the Beaver Falls F3. Same one I mentioned earlier re: debris transport. This is from one of the homes where a fatality occurred. The woman's nephew said that a number of trees on the property were stripped bare and some of the grass was torn up.

0WevN04.jpg


He said the family has photos somewhere, so I'm hoping he can locate them and/or I can find some better shots from this property. It actually caused pretty significant damage throughout much of its ~40-mile path.
 
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Re: the very narrow core, another interesting thing is that it still had a multivortex structure in at least some areas. The damage patterns bear that out, and several of the people I talked to who saw the tornado mentioned some variation of "two (or more) tornadoes spinning around and merging together." Must have been little subvortices the size of garden hoses lol
In this post I made awhile back some of the aerials from Lordstown and Niles demonstrate how narrow the extreme swaths of damage were, either from the core or subvortexes: https://talkweather.com/threads/significant-tornado-events.1276/page-47#post-47363
 
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It's not unusual for very intense damage to be confined to a small area, of course, but it's pretty unusual for the gradient to be that extreme. I wrote in the Bridge Creek article about how narrow the violent core was in Moore, but even there it was usually 100-200 yards, often with a few hundred yards or more of moderate damage on either side.
 

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Also, there were a few instances where that super narrow core probably spared a whole bunch of people. For instance, in one area the tornado passed ~150 yards north of a trailer court that was packed with 40-50 people at the time. Had the windfield been more typical for a high-end violent tornado, there very easily could've been dozens of fatalities. As it was, the trailers were basically untouched. One person said they didn't even know there was a tornado until they started hearing all sorts of sirens going by.
 
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It's not unusual for very intense damage to be confined to a small area, of course, but it's pretty unusual for the gradient to be that extreme. I wrote in the Bridge Creek article about how narrow the violent core was in Moore, but even there it was usually 100-200 yards, often with a few hundred yards or more of moderate damage on either side.
I have a feeling Pampa, TX would have been similar, assuming it stayed on the ground long enough; it's core was clearly visible so that makes it look narrow but the entire circulation of the stretched up to 300-400 yards like Wheatland, as seen it videos of it.
Last series of questions and I'll quit badgering you for the night: do all extremely violent tornadoes (EF3+) have a multivortex structure, or can there be "single-vortex" EF4+ tornadoes? Also, is it possible that all tornadoes are actually multivortex structures but we simply don't have the means to contact subvortices in weak to moderate tornadoes yet, especially if they are extremely narrow? Not sure how to phrase that but you get the idea.
 
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Also, there were a few instances where that super narrow core probably spared a whole bunch of people. For instance, in one area the tornado passed ~150 yards north of a trailer court that was packed with 40-50 people at the time. Had the windfield been more typical for a high-end violent tornado, there very easily could've been dozens of fatalities. As it was, the trailers were basically untouched. One person said they didn't even know there was a tornado until they started hearing all sorts of sirens going by.
That's remarkable, I've heard similar stories of satellite tornadoes narrowly missing people or houses (like Elvis in Tupelo) but an entire core sparing a whole group of people like that is incredible.
 

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I have a feeling Pampa, TX would have been similar, assuming it stayed on the ground long enough; it's core was clearly visible so that makes it look narrow but the entire circulation of the stretched up to 300-400 yards like Wheatland, as seen it videos of it.
Last series of questions and I'll quit badgering you for the night: do all extremely violent tornadoes (EF3+) have a multivortex structure, or can there be "single-vortex" EF4+ tornadoes? Also, is it possible that all tornadoes are actually multivortex structures but we simply don't have the means to contact subvortices in weak to moderate tornadoes yet, especially if they are extremely narrow? Not sure how to phrase that but you get the idea.
It depends on the swirl ratio, which is basically the relationship between the velocity of the air flowing into the tornado's core and the strength of the updraft. That, in turn, can vary depending on a huge range of factors, many of which aren't necessarily directly related to the actual intensity of the tornado. Even things like debris loading and surface roughness (rugged/forested vs. open field vs. populated area, etc.) have a major impact.

Which I guess is a long-winded way of saying that there aren't really any hard-and-fast rules - pretty much any kind of tornado can theoretically have any kind of internal structure. Just as an example, there doesn't seem to have been any evidence of multiple vortices through most of Bridge Creek-Moore's path.

There are a bunch of really fascinating studies on this and how it influences tornado intensity and whatnot. I'll try to find some of them again later.
 
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