Lake Martin EF4
Member
Hmmm....decent point. I'll put an asterisk next to it.
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tornado examiner
Member
The goldsby tornado slabbed numerous very well built, very well anchored homes as we all know.
Lake Martin EF4
Member
Yes - the convo was about Chickasha, not Goldsby. Goldsby 100% would have been rated EF5 today, and quite possibly ANY period with the exception of 2011 and the very worst of La Plata and Vilonia Syndromes.
Also, I think I found another victim of La Plata Syndrome:
La Plata Syndrome: So bad, it even screwed up the rating of a 52 year old tornado.
Oh man i forgot about Barnesville! The house wasn't just well built, it was less than two years old, and it was built to hurricane specifications. The foundation was built of firmly reinforced and fully filled/sealed concrete masonry, encased on the outside by brick veneer. It rose a little less than a foot above the ground. Some additional reinforced masonry columns were located in the open space inside the foundation. The house was torn loose and thrown 50 yards, with only a few remaining pieces of plumbing and brick inside the foundation. The rest of the house was granulated with tiny fragments scattered into the forest.
Here's the REALLY interesting part. In the Jim Ladue presentation @ColdFront shared in here, there was a slide about anchoring methods and where they rank in the "lower bound" to "upper bound" DI spectrum. Look at the #1 anchoring method. Strap wraps. The exact same kind used in this home that you can clearly see were ripped in half from underneath the base plate. This is highly indicative of a strong continuous load path from roof to foundation. Barnesville wasn't just an EF5, It was a high end EF5 with Upper Bound DOD 10 wind speeds. That is 220 mph winds as explicitly outlined in the current version of the EF scale.
Here's a flyover of the damage.
And here's a closer look of the damage that was done to the forest directly by the home. Intense debarking and scouring, plus look at all those root balls!
And here's a closer look of the damage that was done to the forest directly by the home. Intense debarking and scouring, plus look at all those root balls!
N0mz
Member
This tornado always interests me because I was a few miles south of where this tornado crossed Interstate 75. Driving back to Atlanta the next day I saw a very wide damage path of sheared off and debarked trees on both sides of the interstate.
Little doubt in my mind that Barnesville tornado should've been at least an EF4. Two basically no doubt violent tornadoes from 4/27 unheralded due to erroneous surveying.
Union
Member
I didn't mean sweep under the rug in some conspiratorial sense, just that I've seen so many people disregard any problems just because it took 3 months for the the engineers to put out the rating, idk how else I would've worded it but I'm not some tinfoil hat guy. Also I do think all the things you said, and they all connect into each other, I do think it was an EF5 strength tornado, but I'm a rating sense I think it is a very odd scenario, as would any tornado after 12 years getting EF5, and I don't really know if I think it should be EF5 or not, I do not think the calculations are wrong, they did the math and the parameters they used gave them the results that the math turned out as, but there are things in the math that were assumed incorrectly, the tanker car did touch the ground in some areas, it wasn't continually lofted. The grain car was not subjected to static horizontal loading because that isn't how winds In tornadoes are (now if some extreme assuming was done to try and assume the forces acted on the car in every direction, it's probably be just as bad of an example because we dont actually know how it happened) I don't think the calculations were rushed at all because it did take 3 months, but the situations that the math set up to calculate aren't exactly what happened at least from what I've seen come up in the last few days.
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Union
Member
You are right, it's likely not the only analysis they did, but at least from my knowledge no where else has the math for the grain car been released except the excerpt from Marshall on Facebook. And I do not see the problem with finding the rating odd, this method of rating a tornado, with the NTP method, has never been used for an official rating. Not even on the tornadoes found to be EF5 strength in Canada, and then it's first implementation is for the first EF5 in 12 years, all of the other examples given were within the EF scale itself which already had "clear" guidelines for years, even for El Reno, DOW radar had been used in ratings before that multiple times. I understand why they implemented it at this moment, it's such an extreme example of what the NTP method was trying to find, but for the first use to be the reasoning to officially rate something EF5 just feels wild to me, not wild because it's bad necessarily but wild because it's actually rated EF5, I was watching Minecraft videos on my iPad the last time an EF5 was rated as such.
There's nothing wrong with questioning it, and I can see the logic there. However, and please correct me if I'm wrong about this, but isn't this pretty much what they do for damage calcs across the board, specifically for homes and buildings? Intuition tells me that math involving these things would not only be extraordinarily nontrivial to solve, but also would increase the uncertainty involved with said calculation to a drastic degree, so much so that it becomes useless to do so in the first place. I'm pretty unsure on whether or not we can take these things into account super accurately without making the math painfully ridiculous. I don't even know how well computers can solve such things - If we were to take into account some sort of extra factor, such as a "rocking" motion preceding a tip-over or loft, I imagine it isn't as easy as calculating for a damped/driven oscillator when it comes to getting wind calculations.
I was initially against an EF5 rating for Enderlin for the very reason of "horizontal wind calcs." But I trust the people who survey the damage for a living more than my own intuition when it comes to damage like that. I will say that the heavier trains being "bent" towards the direction of movement, with the wheels dragging through the mud, does seem to indicate that the vast majority of the wind was indeed horizontal here as well.
EDIT: Additionally, just because we haven't seen it due to EF scale contingencies doesn't invalidate the rating. If anything, it's fantastic - it means they're finally broadening their view on what constitutes as EF4+ damage, and this is very good to see. Again, hopefully this opens the door on reanalysis of past tornadoes.
The problem is that basically everything to do with tornado ratings involves some sort of assumptions given the complex nature of the wind fields and damage patterns (and inability to actually observe the winds themselves). The least we can do is use some math to approximate the wind speeds that could have resulted in a certain phenomenon happening. Same goes for photogrammetry and radar estimates.
I will also say that FGF going back and upgrading some of the other DIs that warranted EF4 ratings was a big plus to this whole operation. If we were able to do that for more old tornadoes, well, we've already been discussing ad nauseam the possibilities.
I will also say that FGF going back and upgrading some of the other DIs that warranted EF4 ratings was a big plus to this whole operation. If we were able to do that for more old tornadoes, well, we've already been discussing ad nauseam the possibilities.
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The consequences of potentially overrating wind speeds from time to time (by doing math based on incorrect assumptions) are far better than being too cautious to assume anything (therefore not trusting any of the math) and underrating them almost 100% of the time.
Even the EF scale is basically making the safest assumptions possible with wind speeds, but most surveyors won't even trust those. It's crazy.
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N0mz
Member
Dark woke take: Enderlin is not an ef5 because, even though it takes winds in excess of 200 mph to do what it did to those grain cars, 200 mph windspeeds don't actually do the damage the ef scale says they do. IE it takes winds much higher than 200 to do classic ef5 damage.
tornado examiner
Member
semantics and all that jazz….
This is my very firmly held belief lol. The classification of tornadoes is so beyond out of whack.
In case anyone doesn't understand the consequences of misclassification, or think it doesn't matter, check out the mesoscale discussions from the night of the Enderlin tornado. Look at the tornado intensity estimate. The tornado touched down at 11:02 PM.
9:45 PM
10:15 PM
11:45 PM
An extremely volatile environment, two discreet supercells, and an EF5 tornado with a gate to gate measurement of around 245 mph, and the messaging barely got past a Cat 3 hurricane. Imagine if a Cat 5 hurricane was about to make landfall, but all the forecasters kept saying it was a Cat 2. How could that go wrong? This is like that.
Even after measuring 245 mph winds they still kept warning about 120-150. And it's all because of how we classify them after the fact.
wolfywise
Member
I think there's a misunderstanding here about discerning strength from structure. You can easily tell the difference between an EF1 wedge and an EF4 wedge. Stronger tornadoes are typically much more defined and solid, and when they aren't you can still tell by how vigulorous the multiple vorticies coalesce and contort. A weak wedge is generally more nebulous in shape, with any full condesnation being fleeting and whispy. Its true that size isn't a good indicator of intensity, but the shape and how it behaves can give that kind of insight.
Like the solid grinders in DDC that were rated EF2-3 but were pbviously EF4+ based on mobile radar and visual signifiers. But then you have elephant trunks that touch down for like 3 minutes that kinda whisp about before fizzling. Violent tornados typically look dense and solid, like concrete cylinders dragging across the earth, while weak ones are more like a twirling mist. Get what I mean?
Motion in the vortex is also a fantastic indicator of how violent a tornado is. When there's an overwhelmingly vertical look to the motion within a big wedge, those ones always seem to be the most violent. Jarrell is a prime example of this, you can see in the videos and imagery that there's an overwhelmingly obvious vertical direction to the wind, from that alone you can ascertain EF5 intensity. Andover 1991, Elie 2007, and Pampa 1995 are famous examples of this on video (last 2 aren't wedges though), and they're commonly associated with the most violent motion ever seen on camera. From an outsider's perspective, it looks more like the tornadoes are trying to dig into the ground, which as we know is essentially what ends up happening.
wolfywise
Member
This only makes sense in broad strokes, and thermal weaknesses are negligible for the most part, and still require extreme forces to take advantage of it. Worth noting that Chapman didn't just bend the rails, the tracks were also twisted down at an angle and the railroad ties partially embedded/buried.
Western_KS_Wx
Member
Apologies for just now seeing this, but here are some. I think it’s safe to say this one was probably a bit stronger than an EF3.
Here’s the property of the ‘well-built’ home that was swept clean.
Now for what’s relevant in this discussion, the interesting things I found in the damage points file I received from NWS DDC. While going through the file and plotting out the given coordinates, I noticed these DI’s from Hopewell.
The first 3 photos I attached were from a farmstead that was completely destroyed and had a fatality. It was labeled as an EF4 DI in the file. The home that was described as well-built and being swept away was also labeled as “EF04,” which could be a typo, but interesting nonetheless.
There are a few possibilities that could explain what happened here. Either this was all just a straight up typo and an error, or it was supposed to be upgraded and for whatever reason never got finalized as such. The third possibility, and what I think is the most logical, is that the tornado was initially rated an EF4 then was later downgraded to EF3. Although contextual evidence was crystal-clear indicative of a violent tornado, construction practices weren’t great for the residences impacted.
It is also worth noting that the initial surveys from the first QRT for Greensburg used some rather strict criteria for the residential damage DI’s. They initially said that virtually all the damage within Greensburg was caused by an EF3 to low-end EF4 tornado, and that a section of the High School was what pushed them to rate it an EF5. If they were using those same guidelines for the tornadoes that followed Greensburg, then it’s no wonder none of them were rated higher than EF3, despite both Trousdale and Hopewell cleanly sweeping away farm homes.
Anyway, I emailed NWS Dodge City to see if I could get an explanation about the DI labeled EF4, but never received a response unfortunately. I do plan on emailing the retired DDC Met who surveyed the entire event, and I’ll update if I receive a response.