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Severe Weather 2021

TH2002

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It sounds like he was saying that because it was an NWS survey team, the tornado deserved to be rated EF4. My point being is that there are often mistakes made (and in some cases, quite egregious ones) made by NWS survey teams that inconsistently apply the EF-scale.
But yeah I think what Brice Wood meant is that it's ultimately up to the survey team to decide what rating a tornado gets. I don't think he meant to say we should never question survey teams.
 

buckeye05

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I agree with you on NWS in Memphis and Dallas-Fort Worth. Well Tim Marshall helps NWS Dallas-Fort Worth with surveys so perhaps he is also low balling tornadoes!
Opposite. It’s the one’s he’s absent from that tend to be poorly surveyed. Royce City 2012, Cisco 2015, Copeville 2015, and Blue Ridge 2015 all come to mind. The DAT imagery shows that the survey team got lazy and never even exited their vehicle for parts of the last two I mentioned.

Marshall did assist with the Garland/Rowlett EF4 and the Ovilla EF3, and those were fair and well-executed surveys. His reputation of being overly conservative is undeserved.
 

Nightking2021

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Opposite. It’s the one’s he’s absent from that tend to be poorly surveyed. Royce City 2012, Cisco 2015, Copeville 2015, and Blue Ridge 2015 all come to mind. The DAT imagery shows that the survey team got lazy and never even exited their vehicle for parts of the last two I mentioned.

Marshall did assist with the Garland/Rowlett EF4 and the Ovilla EF3, and those were fair and well-executed surveys. His reputation of being overly conservative is undeserved.
Maybe so, but I have heard Fujita being criticized by a lot of people for being too lenient.
 

TH2002

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Opposite. It’s the one’s he’s absent from that tend to be poorly surveyed. Royce City 2012, Cisco 2015, Copeville 2015, and Blue Ridge 2015 all come to mind. The DAT imagery shows that the survey team got lazy and never even exited their vehicle for parts of the last two I mentioned.

Marshall did assist with the Garland/Rowlett EF4 and the Ovilla EF3, and those were fair and well-executed surveys. His reputation of being overly conservative is undeserved.
Did Marshall come up with different ratings for the first four tornadoes you mentioned?
 

TH2002

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No. He only was on Ovilla and Garland.
So he had no involvement with the survey teams of the first four tornadoes. I was hoping maybe he had surveyed some of the more intense damage on his own time and maybe he would have been able to better challenge the official ratings.
 

buckeye05

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Maybe so, but I have heard Fujita being criticized by a lot of people for being too lenient.
Yeah he did more for the field of damage surveying than anyone, but still definitely made some calls that don’t hold up under modern scrutiny. For example, I don’t care how many times anyone explains it, you aren’t going to convince me that the Plainfield, IL tornado deserved its F5 rating based on corn scouring.
 

Nightking2021

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Opposite. It’s the one’s he’s absent from that tend to be poorly surveyed. Royce City 2012, Cisco 2015, Copeville 2015, and Blue Ridge 2015 all come to mind. The DAT imagery shows that the survey team got lazy and never even exited their vehicle for parts of the last two I mentioned.

Marshall did assist with the Garland/Rowlett EF4 and the Ovilla EF3, and those were fair and well-executed surveys. His reputation of being overly conservative is undeserved.
This was not just a mistake but a giant one! A tornado that had a lower bound of high-end F4 and probably could have been rated an F5 based on the contextual damage! A tornado IMHO was much stronger than the Greensburg tornado a year later that was rated EF5 by Tim Marshall but the other tornado a high-end F3. https://stormtrack.org/community/threads/many-factors-in-rating-a-tornado.7743/
 

buckeye05

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This was not just a mistake but a giant one! A tornado that had a lower bound of high-end F4 and probably could have been rated an F5 based on the contextual damage! A tornado IMHO was much stronger than the Greensburg tornado a year later that was rated EF5 by Tim Marshall but the other tornado a high-end F3. https://stormtrack.org/community/threads/many-factors-in-rating-a-tornado.7743/
Garland/Rowlett was not a high-end EF4 if that is what you are trying to say, nor was there contextual evidence suggesting otherwise. 180 MPH is mid EF4.
 

buckeye05

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His reply was to my comment about Garland/Rowlett so it wasn’t clear that Westminster 2006 was being discussed.

That one was during the height of La Plata syndrome, and probably Tim’s worst work. That survey ignored all the context evidence that was screaming “extremely violent tornado.” I wish this one bad call didn’t totally inspire so much distrust, as his work from 2007 onward is excellent. I do understand though. Westminster was high-end F4+.
 

Equus

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Well that tornado was a sudden scary surprise.

Low EF3 is good call. Homes leveled to that extent should never be lower than EF3 but no contextual support for anything higher given likely poor construction.
 

Nightking2021

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His reply was to my comment about Garland/Rowlett so it wasn’t clear that Westminster 2006 was being discussed.

That one was during the height of La Plata syndrome, and probably Tim’s worst work. That survey ignored all the context evidence that was screaming “extremely violent tornado.” I wish this one bad call didn’t totally inspire so much distrust, as his work from 2007 onward is excellent. I do understand though. Westminster was high-end F4+.
I saw the damage in Greensburg a few days after it happened and I will say it was certainly bad but probably no more violent than any other F5 or EF5 tornado. Tornadoes like Andover, Bridge Creek-Moore 1999, Westminster, Parkersburg, and Smithville seemed quite a bit more violent than the Greensburg tornado.
 
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