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Severe WX December 10 & 11, 2021 Severe Threat

Juliett Bravo Kilo said:
EF2? Uhhhhhhhh..........
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They said that because the house was on a hill, gravity played more of a role in its destruction than the tornado. That has got to be the most ridiculous, bull***t excuse I have ever heard to lowball a tornado.

But enough about tornadoes being lowballed for now. Let's just hope they don't try to pull something like that with this tornado.
 
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CheeselandSkies said:
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I'm getting the vibe more and more that this truly is the modern day equivalent of the 1925 Tri-State tornado, not just because of the track length and forward speed, but because of how much of the track seems top-tier intensity.
 
pohnpei said:
Some Incredible, almost Bassfield level tree damage near MO/AR broaderline.
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I have to say, I'm heartbroken. My mind keeps going back to the Bootheel of MO. I was born in Kennett and lived in Cardwell until I was 23. My wife is from Hornersville. So many blessings that our families back home are safe. I mentioned my nephew losing his home, and posted the pic...but he's alive. My heart is breaking for every community effected. At the same time, realizing just how lucky Monette, Leachville, Hornersville, Hayti, Caruthersville, and the many more that I'm not familiar with are because they only caught glancing blows so to speak. Some of the towns would have been gone forever. I'll stop bleeding my feelings. Just a little overwhelming how dangerous this damn thing was.

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I can sort of see a reason for a FEW of the stupid lowballs of recent years but if this isn't EF5 level damage the entire scale should be thrown out. Reminder the Belmond tornado in 1966 STILL is on file as a 5 for shifting one poorly anchored house off its foundation in a pile.
 
Liberty4dayz said:
I have to say, I'm heartbroken. My mind keeps going back to the Bootheel of MO. I was born in Kennett and lived in Cardwell until I was 23. My wife is from Hornersville. So many blessings that our families back home are safe. I mentioned my nephew losing his home, and posted the pic...but he's alive. My heart is breaking for every community effected. At the same time, realizing just how lucky Monette, Leachville, Hornersville, Hayti, Caruthersville, and the many more that I'm not familiar with are because they only caught glancing blows so to speak. Some of the towns would have been gone forever. I'll stop bleeding my feelings. Just a little overwhelming how dangerous this damn thing was.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk
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Agreed, there was a possible chance of strong tornadoes in the forecast. I don't think anybody was expecting this, including myself.
 
Equus said:
I can sort of see a reason for a FEW of the stupid lowballs of recent years but if this isn't EF5 level damage the entire scale should be thrown out. Reminder the Belmond tornado in 1966 STILL is on file as a 5 for shifting one poorly anchored house off its foundation in a pile.
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Not going towards you in any defensive way, just curious, what else is missing for this tornado to be a certain EF5?
 
Fred Gossage said:
I'm getting the vibe more and more that this truly is the modern day equivalent of the 1925 Tri-State tornado, not just because of the track length and forward speed, but because of how much of the track seems top-tier intensity.
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That tweet actually sounds to me kind of like what Tuscaloosa did after Tuscaloosa and before NW B'ham; only this time there actually were other towns in the way during that time. So if that's not EF5, I don't know what is.
 
Juliett Bravo Kilo said:
Yeah this whole mindset of 'conservative = accurate' when it comes to tornado ratings needs to stop, now. So many underrated tornadoes in the past decade (Chickasha, Goldsby, Vilonia and Chapman 2016 being the ones discussed most often on this site) that if not a single EF5 from this accurate then I'm giving up with the EF scale, or at least how it's currently administered.
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I find it rather striking the way the lower bound is used as a default. The EF scale has three 'hard' windspeeds for each DoD, lower, upper and expected. I have no issue with initially announcing a LB on first appearance (imagine the hoo-ha if a tornado was downgraded) but surely the rating should revert to near the expected value unless there is evidence in either direction (the building is better/worse constructed) as it's, you know, expected - it should be the default. Yet the application we actually see is more like 'minimum until proven otherwise'. The upper bound for a house is 220 mph yet it seems to be very difficult to achieve even the 200 mph 'expected' without surrounding contextual evidence being astonishing. Either the application is poor or the standard of 'well constructed' for the expected windspeed is so rare and difficult that it defeats that whole point of the Fujita scale, namely that all categories are based on a very common structure (the ordinary house). Or both.

The wider problem is they can't even decide what the EF scale wants to be. For earthquakes you have two scales - magnitude (the actual energy release, Mw) and intensity (the damage, using the Modified Mercalli Scale or similar). One reason given for disregarding doppler radar measurements (unlike that the measurements are well above the ground, an argument I'm sympathetic to) is that it's a damage scale. Now firstly, Fujita's own use of non-standard indicators shows he didn't think of the F scale purely as a damage scale. More importantly, certain low ratings have the justification that for a given reason (aside from construction quality) the damage could have been caused at a lower windspeed (the mobile home impacting the house at Goldsby comes to mind). That's bringing windspeed back into it. So the EF scale is not a pure damage scale either, and is in some sort of no-man's land, one with perhaps a bit too much room for personal interpretation.
 
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Brice said:
Not going towards you in any defensive way, just curious, what else is missing for this tornado to be a certain EF5?
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Not so much that there's extreme high end EF5 damage indicators all along the path but if they explain away every instance of potential EF5 damage with the usual "one bolt was maybe missing a washer/maybe it was hit by a flying car/there's a tree standing on the edge of the property/we just felt like using the lowest end wind estimate possible" for all 250+ miles of high end damage just to avoid giving a higher rating, we've got some major problems with the application of the EF scale (or even bigger than was already obvious)

It's annoying that the criterion for EF5 was made almost legitimately impossible to attain; what's the point of having a six point 0-5 scale if we're only allowed to use the lowest four and rarely the fifth for damage appropriate to it?
 
A Guy said:
I have no issue with initially announcing a LB on initial appearance (imagine the hoo-ha if a tornado was downgraded) but surely the rating should revert to near the expected value unless there is evidence in either direction (the building is better/worse constructed). Yet the application we actually see is more like 'minimum until proven otherwise'. The upper bound for a house is 220 mph yet it seems to be very difficult to achieve even the 200 mph 'expected' without surrounding contextual evidence being astonishing. Either the application is poor or the standard of 'well constructed' for the expected windspeed is so rare and difficult that it defeats that whole point of the Fujita scale, namely that all categories are based on a very common structure (the ordinary house).
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This is exactly the sort of thing I have been incensed about for years, what's the point of the expected and upper bound if the rule is "always default to lowest bound possible"? I have ebven seen on at least two occasions a WFO actually rating below the lowest bound wind speed estimate possible on the EF chart. It's killing my confidence in the application of the scale.

Perhaps the long trackers get the ratings they deserve and my rants prove to be unfounded, finally, but the precedent has been horrible for so long I don't have a ton of hope
 
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