That is the Oak Grove home, yes. Very impressive in size and appearance, but those two things do not automatically mean it was extremely well-constructed.
Got it thank you! Just wanted to make sure I was thinking of the right one. It’s the same home the tornado absolutely destroyed a sports corvette I believe.
That is genuinely some of the most impressive scouring i’ve ever seen.
I called out a surveyor for bad science after he made fun of talk weather and its users on Twitter. If that's self absorbed I guess I can deal with that. Personally, I think derailing this thread with constant jabs and quips so you can be "proven right" when you actually get a rise out of me is a bit self absorbed, but that's just me.
He’s not a surveyor at all. He’s a high school weather hobbyist.
I’m certainly no mister sunshine and rainbows, and I refuse to subscribe to the notion that everyone’s opinion is valid, and yours most certainly is not. I’ll give it to you cut and dry: you generally don’t really know what you’re talking about most of the time and it dilutes the quality of discussion on this forum. I will not walk on eggshells when it comes to unadulterated willful ignorance, which you are the very embodiment of. I’ve seen only ONE other user here who had such a massive disparity gap between their (unearned) confidence and actual knowledge, and your gap is the size of the Grand Canyon. You’ve conducted yourself in such a way that nobody on this forum is going to bat for you at this stage. It’s a generally patient, open minded group of people here, so that speaks volumes. I have nothing else to say to you besides this…
The Westminster, TX 2006 tornado like I have said should have been rated high-end F4 or F5.
This is very interesting and does certainly support tornadic winds being stronger than the EF scale predicts, but one thing worth mentioning is that it appears that this data was taken on the right side of the tornado, so the forward translational speed is added to the actual winds too. I'm not sure how fast El Reno 2011 moving, but I'm guessing it was pretty quick based on some of the videos I have seen of the monster. This point also doesn't really discredit the storm's power in any way, as I am a firm believer in a faster tornado's forward velocity significantly contributing in how intense damage can appear, so I don't believe it should be used as a critique on the intensity of the storm either.
and yes correct that its likely its purely horizontal component to them, i think el reno 2011 had a average speed around 30 ish mph ?
Just ran a very rough calculation on the average forward speed and got ~36 mph, so that tracks. I took the path length as ~63 miles and the duration as ~1.75 hr (~1 hour 45 minutes) and that speed seems to straddle the line between a sledgehammer effect speedster and a slow-moving grinder tornado. Also, that correlates to the gust w/o forward speed being taken into account still being in the EF2 range (~117 mph) so the contour still underestimates the windspeed despite the heavy caveats being considered.
I might be getting hold the wrong end of the stick here, but does the translation matter? The windspeed is what the anemometer feels, in practice there's no 'actual windspeed' to which the translational speed is added. I remember many years ago reading someone call it the 'Spencer Observation' after the 1998 tornado. It was shown the worst damage was displaced south of the true centre of the vortex, due to the translation. This had been theorised but not proven until then. And it's that windspeed that's measured by the EF scale.
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding the wording here, but isn't this exactly what they mean by the "sledgehammer effect" - aka the forward speed playing a role? If the worst of the damage is south of the tornado's vortex, since most tornadoes move in a NW or WNW direction, that should correlate to the winds south of the center being stronger.
I don't remember seeing the term before, though searching this forum I'll have read a post or two that used it. I don't think it's a great analogy. I can't recall seeing it used 'against' a tornado's intensity, unlike very slow speeds.
I thought I heard of some posters here bringing it up when it came to the context of "downgrading" a tornado before - but I cannot recall which tornado that may have been, so I could definitely be wrong there.
The general assumption I've seen is that the speeds are additive, which is used in, amongst other things, the interpretation of doppler radar data. This is the opposite of what you're assuming.
I do believe this is that Mesonet station afterwards. I got this photo from a friend who knows a mesonet tech
