We are aware of the current situation. We all saw it, and there’s no point in rehashing it. The question is, what comes next?
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Severe WX December 10 & 11, 2021 Severe Threat
- Thread starter Richardjacks
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Shakespeare 2016
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I know I am completely baffled like the rest of you.
You honestly should @ NWS Louisville with this. They should be pressured into publicly addressing this blatant inconsistency.
Even more outrageous than these ratings is bad communication from the NWS, and a complete lack of respect that the NWS shows toward anyone in the general public (meterological or otherwise) who questions them regarding the ratings or particular DI's along the tornado's path.
At this point, I don’t think they’re being avoidant and dismissive out of disrespect, I think they’re doing it because they’ve outsourced so much survey work to non-NWS employees, and are out of the loop, and trying to cover their butts about it. I mean check out the NWS Louisville Twitter. The guy said “it might be the construction.” Dude clearly is confused about all this himself and doesn’t know what is going on or what else to say, since it’s out of their hands at this point.
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Tanner
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For the record, the NWS isn't obgliged to be in constant or even minimal communication with people like us who have little to no experience or credentials to our name (aside from the few who seem to have architectual background). However, I get that it would be nice for the teams on social media to be more transparent seeing as there are SO many questions regarded the system, how it works and what the intentions are when applying a certain rating.
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The NWS is a government agency that does serve the public though. And it's a vital agency as well.
MNTornadoGuy
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Reportedly the NWS national raters prevented it from being rated as an EF4. It is not NWS Louisville's fault.
southmdwatcher
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I hate to chime in on this but NWS and NOAA are political agencies that deal with science....remember that.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Outside influences are what are causing the bad surveys, not the WFOs themselves.
Blacksheep
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It appears groupthink is an epidemic within NWS offices. Where is a strong logical dejection from someone with credentials/spine. High school geography students would make more reasoned assessments.
Blacksheep
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To be fair the NWS forecasters do a fantastic job forecasting and are good people. The execution / communication after is just a cluster. They issued so many tornado emergencies (that saved lifes) and tweets stating “violent /extreme destruction /catastrophic - that language historically for ef5 and now sit in offices lowballing those same events instead a proving them. The proof seems available especially contextual, aren’t they steaming mad? Even Supreme Court justices dissent, where is the transparency/ gall to state publicly “ i disagree with the final report”
Equus
Member
It doesn't matter what the construction quality is in this case the NWS has assigned ratings NOT EVEN ALLOWED FOR THAT LEVEL OF DAMAGE. The smoothbrains defending the ratings with "ur not an engineer u weren't there!!!!" need to realize that these ratings literally defeat the purpose of having a slider on the scale, regardless of engineering. The entire point of HAVING an upper and lower bound is to account for engineering. All walls down has a minimum of 142 regardless of construction, and that degree of roof loss has a MAXIMUM of 116. In both cases they have broken the bounds of the scale by more 20 mph and that is indefensible regardless of engineering. If they're allowed to just rate however, then what is the point of having an EF scale to begin with?
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This. Stay within the upper and lower bound ranges, or don’t use the scale at all. Those limits were specifically put into place in order to prevent underrating and overrating. If survey teams are gonna ignore rules set in place, then we might as well scrap the EF scale. One of the biggest objectives was to prevent another era of early 2000s type inconsistency and confusion, yet look where we are now…
Equus
Member
I'm legitimately mad about this massacre of ratings both one way and the other, from region to region and event to event, I need to take some time to just not think about it probably. I hope Grazulis has some stuff to say about the stuff through 2019 at least since it's looking like the official record is getting as inconsistent and bad as the F scale era.
Oh, we should also move all this to the EF scale thread; perhaps a mod could the posts not directly related to 12/10 to that one?
Oh, we should also move all this to the EF scale thread; perhaps a mod could the posts not directly related to 12/10 to that one?
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Dissention doesn't do any good and can harm your career aspirations.
To put it bluntly, people working in the meteorological field want to keep their jobs, and they don't want to rock the boat and cause issues that could threaten their employment and ability to move up. Because of this, it falls on people like Grazulis, and groups like the TornadoTalk research team to be able to be that dissenting voice, and potentially enact change. It's not going to occur internally, I'll tell you that much.
Equus
Member
Honestly the lowballing isn't the worst issue anymore, if ratings were consistently lower end from WFO to WFO that's at least a consistent system; all I ask is for a tornado's rating to not depend entirely on which WFO it happened to occur in. Might not see violent tornadoes anymore but at least they could be compared to each other
The fact that we noticed most of the paths from the recent outbreak occurred in the NWS Louisville and NWS Memphis CWAs, and all collectively basically went "well s**t, this isn't going to turn out well", and ended up being completely right, shows how much personal bias is causing these issues, and how consistently bad some survey teams are. If I had to guess, I'd wager that WFOs like the two above just aren't that interested in the topic, and would rather push the responsibility to others who have less expertise on tornado damage. I'd also wager that the best survey teams take on a lot more responsibility when it comes to surveys, and likely keep influence from non-met surveyors to a minimum.